Near the end of last year I set up a youtube channel called Divas Dinosaurs and Demons that was designed to show case my original fiction. Sadly as I haven’t used this blog in some time it slipped my mind to share it here, but since I’ve decided to start posting again, I figured why not use this platform to further push my work?
All chapters of my stories are released on Divas, Dinosaurs and Demons weekly, and all episodes are read by professional actors, and accompanied by original covers. (Though the illustrations are made up of stock images and AI art.)
Among the actors I’ve hired to read out my stories include Joey Sourlis, Catherine Sharples, Bradley Gareth, Michael Duncan and Sophie Aldred, best known for starring as Ace in Doctor Who.
The artwork meanwhile is supplied by Brazilian artist Caio Vincicus Corsini Filhio.
Gina Carano has recently being doing the rounds again on social media. The usual suspects, AV club, Mary Sue, and so on are celebrating her apparent downfall and bullying her in all kinds of ways from gloating over her career, to making jokes about her sex life, to poking fun at her weight. As a fan of Gina, both as an actress and a fighter, it has been hard to watch, but what makes it even more infuriating is the disgusting hypocrisy from her critics.
Never mind the fact that many of her critics identify as feminists, yet have torpedoed the career of a strong woman (because of what the media told them.) There is also the fact that other figures in the geeksphere have done considerably worse, yet not received any kind of backlash, such as Mark Hamill and Neil Patrick Harris. To be clear I am not saying that I want these figures to be cancelled, but I still find it interesting that some people who are in with the bricks get a free pass whilst others don’t. To me it shows how the so called progressive mob, are really just a nasty, upper middle class clique who love dominating the genre and having the power to finish people, but don’t have any real principles of their own.
Now for those of you who don’t know what the drama around Gina Carano is, I’ll give you a recap. Carano is a former mixed martial artist champion who in the late 00s began an acting career, starring in action flicks like Haywire, In The Blood, and Scorched Earth. In 2020 she landed a role in The Mandalorian as the bounty hunter Cara Dune. Her character proved popular and she was even set to get her own spin off. Sadly however it came to an end when she made several comments that were deemed unacceptable by the woke mob, who launched a smear campaign against her which led to Carano being fired. The media has always reported it as Carano getting fired because she made comments that were both racist and transphobic, and clearly all of the supposed, die hard leftists and anti establishment types who hate her, ultimately just went along with everything the actual racist, right wing, mainstream media said. (Curiously however almost none of them will ever answer you when asked to provide ONE thing she said that was racist.)
What actually happened was Gina Carano refused to endorse the group Black Lives Matter as she did not want to get involved in politics (ironically). For this she was smeared as a racist. The mob on twitter then demanded she put her pronouns in her bio to make up for it. She said she didn’t want to as she found that to be a creepy way for the media to label how many minorities they have hired to make themselves look good, and I agree. She has also made it clear that she has 0 problem with trans people or gay people. Contrary to popular belief she has never expressed any TERF opinions online and she was actually best friends with a lesbian woman for years, specifically her MMA rival Tonya Evinger. There were even rumours of the two having an affair, as they were spotted on numerous nights out together dancing at gay bars, though Evinger did confirm they had kissed many times, she also stressed that nothing happened beyond that. She did say that Gina was up for doing more however. Gina Caran has also referred to Tulsi Gabbard as sexy several times too, leading to rumours she has a crush on the former Presidential candidate. Again I don’t know what the truth is, but Gina has certainly been happy for people to think that.
Only a gay hating conservative monster would befriend a lesbian, go to gay bars with her, kiss her and roll around in bed with her.
Following the backlash to not listing her pronouns, Carano put beep boop bop in her bio to ridicule her critics to show how meaningless it was, which they then stupidly used as proof that she hates all trans people. After this Carano was then criticised for claiming that the 2020 election was rigged and for stating anti vaccer beliefs.
The final straw came however when she compared her political rivals to Nazis trying to dehumanise her and others they disagreed with.
Now to be clear I do not agree with Gina Carano’s opinions about the election, vaccination or her rivals being like the Nazis, but there is absolutely nothing wrong morally in anything she said. Thinking that an election was rigged? Ironically all of Gina’s critics did this for 5 fucking years about the 2016 election, with all the bogus Russiagate crap. Hell they are still doing it!
Similarly whilst I am vaccinated, given the absolute arse the government on both sides of the Atlantic made of the COVID situation, whether it was Trump, Biden, Johnson or Sunak, I can understand people not trusting them.
Finally comparing your political rivals to the Nazis whilst hysterical and over the top is hardly racist. Again it is ironically something that a good chunk of Gina Carano’s critics have done again and again about their own political rivals, such as Donald Trump!
See here.
Based on this Sarah Silverman is clearly an anti semite, as according to Gina’s critics, comparing people you don’t like to Nazis is supporting Nazis.
As you can see Gina Carano did not at any point express any racist or transphobic/homophobic views. In fact she isn’t even that right wing. Ironically she has actually taken more genuinely left wing positions than a lot of her critics. For instance, she was partying in gay bars ten years ago when it was less socially acceptable or trendy for celebs to show solidarity with LGBT people. Carano has also publicly expressed support for Julian Assange, a journalist who for the past 11 years has been persecuted by the American government for exposing America’s war crimes. Assange’s persecution and subsequent imprisonment is a threat to honest journalism and future attempts to expose the American war machine for what it is. Yet the supposed Nazi loving, right wing extremist Gina Carano is the one to use her platform to talk about this, whilst the Mary Sue (one of the websites that led the backlash against her.) Is moaning about why some people don’t like She Hulk? The only right wing thing you can accuse Gina Carano of is working with Ben Shapiro. Now in all fairness I dislike Ben Shapiro greatly, but to be fair to Gina, A/ he is the only person who will work with her after her thought crimes, and B/ as much as I may dislike him, he is hardly worse than anyone in mainstream Hollywood. Shapiro may have disgusting views about health care and gay marriage, but he hasn’t protected sexual predators like Roman Polanski and Harvey Weinstein and he also hasn’t bullied a grieving father out of placing a Spider-Man picture on his sons grave because he couldn’t milk every cent out of the character, like Gina’s last employers, Disney did.
We also all know that Walt Disney has never EVER been embroiled in any controversies about racism or insane anti communist paranoia either.
The great irony is that Carano, is everything the Mary Sue and many of her critics claim to want to see. She IS a genuinely strong woman, who was a pioneer in a male dominated area, Mixed Martial Arts, who was actually supportive of the LGBT community in less enlightened times, and calls out American imperialism. I also find it ironic that her movie, Terror on the Prairie which her critics have laughed at over its perceived failure, also does represent a woman starring in what is normally a male led genre, Westerns.
Sci fi and fantasy, that feminist websites like The Mary Sue love to demonise as a boys only club, have actually always had a strong female presence. From Lucy Lawless to Sigourney Weaver, to Sarah Michelle Gellar, countless women have been able to make careers in this genre, whilst Westerns truly are almost exclusively dominated by men. The Mary Sue however will demand that everyone like an obviously shit female led sci fi show like Jodie Whittaker era Doctor Who, because it’s important for representation in this genre(despite the hundreds of genuinely popular female led sci fi shows and films before Jodie.) Yet here one of the few female led films in a genuinely male led genre, should be boycotted and laughed at?
To me all of this rank hypocrisy smacks of an elite mob in Hollywood having control over the sci fi and fantasy genres and using identity politics to silence their critics. Sadly a lot of genre fans, clearly don’t think for themselves when it comes to politics or are too scared of being in the firing line themselves, so they go along with what the elites tell them. “You say Gina is a racist, well okay that’s that then. I won’t bother looking into it, or thinking for myself, my tribe says she is a racist and that’s that.”
The real lesson to learn here is anyone who is even the tiniest threat to the elites in the industry’s narrative, even if it is a woman must be stamped out and crushed. Gina became a threat the second she didn’t do something they wanted, endorse BLM. She didn’t actually criticise BLM, just the fact that she didn’t say “how high” when they said “jump” was in the elite’s eyes a threat as it meant that their hold might not be as ironclad as they thought.
It absolutely was never about protecting trans people, or calling out racism. Conclusive proof of that is that people who do dance to the elites every whim have got away with far more offensive and disgusting remarks and actions than Gina Carano.
Neil Patrick Harris for example an actor known for starring in a number of popular television series, and who recently landed a big role in Doctor Who’s 60th anniversary, back in 2011 created a cake done up to look like Amy Winehouse’s corpse, which he not only showed off at a party, but posted online for the entire world to see. This was just a few months after Amy’s tragic and untimely passing.
Harris’ disgusting actions were sadly typical of the treatment Amy got from the media at the time. She unlike say Jodie Whittaker (who was largely criticised for her awful performance and the politics she brought into her casting) was a victim of a misogynistic smear campaign. Amy was regularly called ugly, crack whore, junkie slut, and was mocked for both her weight and her mental health problems regularly in the mainstream media, not just in a few youtube videos.
Harris was clearly trying to cash in on that disgusting attitude at the time, though it backfired somewhat in that his cake was too much even by the fucked up standards of 2011.
Now again I can’t stress this enough. I do NOT want Neil Patrick Harris to be fired from any job or blacklisted. As much as I hate him for that cake, at the end of the day free speech must apply for everyone. Also whether Harris is a disgusting person or not, should not have any bearing on his talent as an actor. Unless he is actually a danger to anyone on set, or a criminal of course, which he is not.
However that said, what he did was obviously worse than anything Gina Carano said, yet these same websites that have relished in Gina Carano’s supposed downfall, praise Harris constantly?
Here is the post that finally did Gina Carano in that these websites use as proof that she deserves to be bullied and laughed at.
Here meanwhile is what Neil Patrick Harris did that evidently doesn’t bother them at all.
Here is how sites that care so much about toxicity in the genre, and promoting women view Harris after doing this.
Rachel Leishman is a writer for the Mary Sue who has written dozens of articles attacking Carano, slating her as a fascist, gloating over her perceived failures etc. At this stage she is practically Carano’s stalker. Here is what she thinks about Neil Patrick Harris.
You can see how they all either love him, or at least don’t care enough to slander him, bring up his past, and are happy to celebrate his career and role in Doctor Who.
I guess tweeting stupid shit, doesn’t apply to their buddy Harris and his corpse cake pictures. By the way, the AV club lied about the movie’s box office returns.
We Got This Covered. Now in all fairness they did bring up Harris’ cake in a previous article, but it wasn’t anywhere near as judgemental as their articles about Gina, and after bringing it up once, they have never done so again. With Gina however?
Again a lie repeated enough times just becomes accepted as fact. Say she was anti semitic enough times and the morons who click on our site will believe. Also I think it’s hilarious that We Got This Covered claim the Internet never forgets.
They seemed to forget about this didn’t they? I mean yeah they mentioned it once, in a very neutral, non judgemental way before going back to kissing Neil Patrick Harris’ arse. Even though this was something he actually did, unlike Gina being anti semitic.
The irony is that the post this very website earlier claimed justified her firing was calling for people to be gentle with one another. I guess though if Gina Carano had just bullied a grieving family, and took part in the media endorsed mocking of a woman with anorexia and jumping on her grave like Harris did, then We Got This Covered and Scott Campbell (who has written countless articles on this site attacking Carano) would have happily turned the other cheek and welcomed her with open arms into the Doctor Who family.
To be fair Harris is not alone in getting away with things that Carano wouldn’t.
Stephen King, the famous horror writer who again is praised, particularly for his politics on We Got This Covered, actually DID praise a Nazi, Stepan Bandera as a great man. He also expressed extremely bigoted views towards Russians, stating that they were too stupid to enjoy his books and that he was superior to every Russian writer.
Meanwhile for calling an actual Nazi a great man, We Got This Covered who claim the internet never forgets, did completely forget or turned a blind eye to King’s pro Nazi beliefs.
Hmmm seems that to We Got This Covered and Scott Campbell, comparing people you don’t like to Nazis like Gina Carano did, means you are an anti semite, and should be smeared as such every single time your name is brought up. Saying an actual Nazi collaborator was a great man, like Stephen King did however………. is nothing?
Mark Hamill, best known for playing Luke Skywalker and voicing the Joker in numerous Batman cartoons, has also made some ridiculous political comments over the last few years, which could easily be interpreted as being more offensive than anything Carano has said.
Now for the record I am a huge Mark Hamill fan. (Showing I am not being biased here.) Mark Hamill’s performance as the Joker to me is one of the all time greatest villain performances in any medium. I have not only praised his performance throughout my entire life, but I was also the one who set up the petition to get Mark to play the Joker in the animated Killing Joke, which he endorsed! Sadly the film didn’t quite turn out how I’d hoped. Basically like everyone else, I disliked the opening 30 mins with Batgirl and Bruce bumping uglies, but I loved the actual adaptation and Mark’s performance. In hindsight however I am glad it was made in spite of the controversy, as in light of Kevin Conroy’s tragic and untimely death, it marked the last serious production in which he and Hamill were together as Batman and the Joker, with the final few mins representing some of their best work together.
Still whilst I will always be a fan of Hamill and I think he is a great guy overall. When it comes to politics he has been very guilty of jumping on the current thing, without really thinking. The worst example of this was in a recent interview where he stated that Ukraine was the first country since World War 2 to be invaded. This completely ignores all of the countries the US has invaded and destablised and destroyed, like Iraq, Libya, Vietnam, Korea and Chile.
I personally think Mark just said something stupid without really thinking, (showing you can be a great man in some ways, but not others.) Some political commentators did however argue that Hamill’s comments demonstrated ignorance of countries like Iraq simply because they were not white. Again I disagree with that sentiment, but still if you can extrapolate that Carano was undermining the horrors of the holocaust, then you absolutely could say the same thing about Hamill in regards to the Iraq War, the Vietnam War and the Libyan Crisis.
Again obviously I don’t want Hamill cancelled, but if Gina Carano should be for apparently trivializing one tragedy from history, then why does Hamill get a free pass for outright ignoring other atrocities?
The absolute worst example of sites like the Mary Sue and the AV Club’s hypocrisy and someone getting away with far worse than what Gina Carano did, however is their welcoming back James Gunn with open arms after his dodgy past was exposed. Back in 2009 and 10 Gunn made numerous jokes about raping underage boys, and sharing child porn online. As soon as these tweets were unearthed when Gunn supported the cancelling of Roseanne Barr, the director was briefly cancelled by Disney and fired from working on Guardians of the Galaxy 3 (after having directed the first two.)
After a backlash from both fans and Gunn’s co-stars however he was reinstated and the Mary Sue have since forgotten about his past tweets and have actually supported his work, including Guardians 3, The Suicide Squad, and taking over DC comics films and television series.
Here by the way are the tweets Gunn made circa 2008 – 10.
Now in all fairness to Gunn, these posts whilst disgusting are no worse than the types of jokes that we have seen in tv shows like South Park and Family Guy (which made a pedophile a recurring character for shock value.)
Given that Gunn’s jokes were on a public platform, and weren’t something he was posting in private. It is most likely he was just trying to be provocative like both of those series, though that does not mean you can’t criticise all three for this type of comedy. Still whilst I absolutely would not say that this is proof that Gunn is a predator, or a cancellable offence. At the same time for the Mary Sue to actually claim that Gina Carano’s posts are more abhorrent, or that her not putting her pronouns in her bio is more offensive than Gunn making blowjob jokes about kids is utterly obscene.
Here is an article by Rachel Leishman, Gina Carano’s own personal stalker on the Mary Sue who has written countless articles trashing the former MMA star, gloating over her perceived failures, calling her a moron, etc, talking about how excited she is about Gunn’s latest Batman announcement.
Hmmmmm, no comment on Gunn’s past actions? Why aren’t you stalking him for his blowjob pedo jokes Rachel? It is clearly less offensive to you to make light of child molestation, than put “beep boop bop” in your twitter bio. Hilariously for a website that’s entire reason for being is supposedly female empowerment. The Mary Sue have created a situation where, a man can get away with a joke about sharing child porn, whilst a woman can’t get away with saying Beep Boop Bop.
The simple reason that Hamill, Harris, Gunn and King get a free pass over everything from corpse cakes, to ignoring the Iraq war, to praising ACTUAL Nazis, is because they are in with the bricks. Harris is a favourite of the elite, Gunn shares the same politics as the Mary Sue, whilst Hamill and King at the very least go along with “the current thing” in terms of politics and both hate Trump. The fact that Carano didn’t go along with absolutely every single little thing they asked her too, was why she was demonised by the elite and cowardly media and fandom for considerably less offensive posts and comments than either Harris, King, Gunn or even Hamill.
The important thing to remember here however, is that the elite within the industry are not really left wing or progressive. They simply hide behind shallow forms of left wing politics, which they use to either rope in shallow people on the left, or cowards too afraid to call them out. It’s important not to turn towards the right completely in an effort to go against them, but at the same time never ever become such a tribal leftist that you’ll instantly go along with whatever they say, as sadly has been the case for a lot of people in regards to Gina Carano.
Jodie Whittaker’s final episode of Doctor Who just aired. Now I have no real interest in the 21st century version of Doctor Who anymore. As a lifelong fan of the classic era, I feel that the revival in all honesty, never really tried to be a proper sequel to the original series. It was written more like a remake, that now and again would make a reference to the original for nostalgia bait, but otherwise didn’t care much about it.
Worse in the last ten or so years the revival has gone out of its way to demolish and vandalise as much of the classic series lore and history and the Doctors character as it could, to the point where the Doctor has no key characterisation any more.
The Hartnell Doctor is no longer the original Doctor now, the Master and the Doctor are now gay lovers, the Doctor isn’t a Time Lord, etc, etc.
All of these terrible, ill fitting retcons were defended by the likes of the BBC themselves, writers like Paul Cornell, Chris Chibnall, and obnoxious fans like the youtuber Samuel Davis (who personally called me a sexist in a youtube video.) As well as forums like Gallifrey Base, Doctor Who Reddit etc. They all claimed that saddos obsessed with continuity like me just didn’t get the show, because “Doctor Who is all about change. If you object to this change, you’re the type of person who would have objected to a previously successful change like William Hartnell changing into Patrick Troughton. You have to be able to learn how to move on.”
With this in mind can someone explain to me why the makers of the revival who are so obsessed with change, have just done a special that’s entire appeal was built on member berries? Why they have for the first time ever, degenerated the Doctor and actually brought a previous actor back as the current Doctor?
Yes, SPOILERS for those who haven’t seen it yet. The rumours are true. David Tennant is the 14th Doctor now.
Personally I think degenerating the Doctor is as bad a move as changing the characters sex. I’m not quite as pissed off about it however, only because it’s hard to care about the show after all the damage that has been done in the last few years. Still it sticks in my throat because of all the abuse I received over “not being able to accept change” in Doctor Who.
Ironically at the end of the day, I actually was the one pushing for change, but it was in a way that would have actually taken the Doctor forward into the 21st century rather than tearing him down. To me the all about change argument has been proven once and for all by Tennant’s casting to be a lie used by the clique of writers who took over the Doctor Who franchise in the 1990s to justify their own inability, or lack of desire to actually write Doctor Who.
This clique is nicknamed the Fitzroy clique, as they used to congregate at the Fitzroy Pub. They include the likes of Paul Cornell, Russell T Davies, Steven Moffat, Chris Chibnall, Nicholas Briggs, Mark Gatiss etc.
This quote from Lawrence Miles I think sums up how obnoxious and cliquey they could be.
But if all this monkey-posturing sounds absurd, then let’s put in the context of the late ’90s / early 2000s. You may remember a time, in the days before “Doctor Who fans” meant thirteen-year-olds, when the Virgin / BBC novels actually seemed important. The authors certainly thought they were important, and pride was their most valued possession. After all, the reason I gained a reputation as an unhealthy influence was that I broke what Keith Topping called “the unspoken code”, the Omerta-like law which held that New Adventures writers should all stick together in the face of fandom and not publicly criticise each others’ work. I say “Omerta”, but in practice, they behaved more like Medieval overlords than mafiosa: the elite have to form a united front, because otherwise, they’ll be revealed as weak, flabby individuals and the peasants will get ideas above their station. Oh, and you’re the peasants, by the way. When the new series began, those authors who were promoted to scriptwriter-level went from “overlords” to “royalty”, which is why my heartless attack on Mark Gatiss was received with the same shock as if a small-time landowner in the Middle Ages had just referred to the Prince of the Realm as a big spaz.
You think I’m exaggerating…? Then consider this. When Paul Cornell took me to task for the social faux-pas of having opinions, he seemed appalled that I was incapable of respecting the natural hierarchy, and asked whether there was anybody I ‘bent the knee’ to. Bent the knee…? What is this, geek feudalism? When I told him that I had no interest in serving or reigning, he asked me: ‘Do your followers know that?’ I found it horrifying that anyone could even think that way, and I still do.”
–Lawrence Miles
Meanwhile this quote from Russell T Davies himself backs it up.
I do worry about being surrounded by yes-men. You’re right, it happens. […] I don’t think it’s happened to me yet. In the end, just as good writers are hard to find, so are good script editors, good producers and good execs. When you find good people like Julie and Phil, their sheer talent cancels out the risk of them yes-ing. I suppose the danger is not RTD And The Yes-Men, but a triumverate of people who are so similar that contrary opinions don’t get a look-in.”
–Russell T Davies
Finally here is an extract from an interview with Paul Cornell and Steven Moffat, which again supports Miles assertion.
Paul:The defining factor for our critics seems to be ‘how like bad television is it?’ It really pisses me off. There was a review in TV Zone recently of Kate Orman’s new book which was entirely based on that premise, how like bad television is this book?
David:And it failed.
Paul:Well of course it failed.
David:Set Piece is not bad television.
Steven:But that’s not what you want. My memories of Doctor Who are based on bad television that I enjoyed at the time. It could get me really burned saying this, but Doctor Who is actually aimed at 11-year-olds. Don’t overstress it, but it’s true. Now what the New Adventures have done, sometimes successfully, is to try and reinterpret that for adults, which has involved a completely radical revision of the Seventh Doctor that never appeared on television. That is brilliant.
Paul:There are big sections of fandom that I appreciate and love… Female fandom in all its forms has been consistently more intelligent than male fandom across the globe. Gay fandom in all its forms has, again, been consistently more intelligent than straight fandom. There’s a liberal, American, college-based fandom too. When you come down to it, our central audience doesn’t read.And that’s a major problem for us… how do we address a new series of books to an audience who don’t know what good books should be like?
Essentially Doctor Who from the 90s on, in all its forms became a playhouse for this cabal of writers, and the fandom was either bullied or duped into going along with everything they said, including the Doctor Who is all about change argument, which was never even close to the truth.
As I have said before many times, in the classic era, the Doctor was NEVER portrayed as being able to turn into absolutely anybody. All of the different incarnations of the Doctor were still meant to be the same person under the new face. This isn’t just my interpretation, all of the actors who played it said as much, as did the most prominent writers and producers involved in the classic era, from Terry Nation, to Terrance Dicks, to Robert Holmes to John Nathan Turner.
Essentially in the classic era, regeneration was an advanced form of healing. The Doctors body broke down, and then it repaired itself, and in the process, it changed its appearance. It basically rebuilt itself from scratch, and as a result the Doctors outer personality shifted somewhat. However his core personality was exactly the same from incarnation to incarnation in a number of ways. (I have already ran through the similarities in previous articles, I won’t be doing so again as it would take too much time.)
Playing and writing the Doctor was about finding the right balance of getting someone who could make it their own, but not so much you could never imagine it still being William Hartnell under the new face.
This was a good thing as it really allowed Doctor Who to have the best of all worlds. From a practical point of view it could change the lead actor, but unlike other series where the lead actor leaves, such as Primeval, and their characters story arcs have to be abandoned. In Doctor Who they could keep all of the previous actors story arcs and relationships like the Doctors feud with the Daleks, the Cybermen, the Master, his friendships with characters like the Brigadier, his status as an outlaw to his people etc. The change in outer personality could also allow a new actor to reinterpret the role in HIS own way, but at the same time there was enough of a characterisation to the character overall, that the Doctor still remained a character, not just a title passed on to otherwise unrelated characters. It also meant that writers could develop the Doctor as a whole over the course of 26 years. There are many examples of story arcs and character development spanning multiple Doctors, such as most notably the Davros story arc, where we see the Doctor cope with his guilt over not having finished Davros and the Daleks.
Meanwhile the argument that Classic Who had no continuity and was constantly rewriting itself is a lie that tries to back itself up by taking changes in classic who completely out of context. There is a difference between filling in a gap and changing something that is established. For instance in the case of Batman, originally he was just a crime fighter, but then it was revealed that he fought crime because his parents were killed. That was a change technically, but it wasn’t contradicting anything as we didn’t know anything about Batman’s back story or why he fought crime before that. However if another writer were to come along after and have it that Batman’s parents were alive without any explanation and reveal that his brothers murder is what inspired him. That obviously wouldn’t work.
With Doctor Who it is exactly the same. For instance, Hartnell morphing into Troughton happened when we knew nothing about the Doctors people, or his alien biology. Whilst yes, it was convenient, it wasn’t actually contradicting anything. Similarly finding out that the Doctors people were called the Time Lords, wasn’t a change, as we didn’t know anything about them before hand. The little information we did know, that the Doctor was on the run from them and was scared to go back, was still adhered to in The War Games. Finding out that his people could only change 12 times was not a change either as we were never told know many times they could. Furthermore notice how once all of these changes were implemented, much like Batman’s parents murder inspiring him to fight crime, they were never contradicted? The 12 regenerations limit remained right until the very end of the classic run. The Doctors people were always the time lords etc.
Now it’s true that there were a few retcons in the classic era’s history and a few continuity blips, but that still does not mean there is no continuity or consistency at all. Every single work of fiction will have continuity blips at some point. Similarly retcons are not pretending there is no continuity. Retcons are where you add something to an existing story, via a loophole, IE we didn’t see this part of the story, so lets show how it really went.
Alan Moore who provided something of a retcon to the Jokers origins in the classic story, The Killing Joke, brilliantly sums up how to use retcons here.
Genesis of the Daleks, which is one of the very few actual retcons in the history of the show, follows Moore’s formula perfectly. We never actually saw the origin of the Daleks in the first story, we only heard a very vague second hand account of it, written centuries later, which is why Terry Nation who wrote both stories felt he could in Moore’s words, put some spin on their origins. He repeatedly stated this in interviews, and I might add that the contradictions between them aren’t even that big anyway.
Both the first Dalek story and Genesis reveal that the Daleks, came from Skaro, were once a humanoid race who engaged in a war with another race called the Thals, which eventually went atomic and destroyed the surface of Skaro. In both cases the Daleks humanoid ancestors degenerated into psychotic, xenophobic octopus monsters, who housed themselves in robot like armour. The only difference is that Genesis reveals that Davros accelerated the Daleks mutation and in essence created them. Both are still compatible though, it’s not like one says the Daleks are complete robot creatures who live on Venus, and another states they came from earth. It’s just that in one, an important figure, Davros was edited out of history, which could have happened in the ensuing years for all sorts of reasons. Maybe the Daleks didn’t want people to know they were the creation of a lesser race? Maybe the Thals themselves didn’t want anyone to know their role in helping him? Either way it does not mean the show has no canon. I might add that once that loophole was exploited and we saw the Daleks origin up front, then that was that. There could be no third origin story of the Daleks as their origins were shown and from then on Davros is their creator.
There is a terror among Doctor Who fans, that continuity of any kind will lead to the show becoming something that only anoraks watch, which will in turn lead to it being cancelled and us going back to the wilderness years again.
Continuity however is not simply referencing the past. It is not a nerd obsession. It is a foundation of story telling. Without it you can’t do the following things, characterisation, character development, relationships, story arcs, world building, you know all the things that you expect from a drama of any kind? Classic Who had baseline continuity like any drama because it had too. The Fitzroy Clique and their commandants will single out the few continuity blips, and ignore the hundreds of other examples of tight continuity to back their claim up, like the Davros story arc, Mondas always being the Cybermen’s home planet, Skaro always being the Daleks home planet, the Doctor being exiled, him first meeting the Brig against the Yeti, Ace’s story arc, Hartnell trying to get Ian and Barbara home, Vicki knowing about the Daleks because she is from after their invasion, Daleks having time travel after The Chase, the Master having no lives left, the Sontarans and the Rutans being at war with each other, the Ice Warriors coming from Mars, Peladon, companions crossing one Doctor to another etc.
New Who from the start threw out most of the Doctors key characterisation and most of the story arcs from the original series, due to the Fitzroy Clique’s lack of interest in them. This naturally provoked a backlash from classic era fans who were instantly dismissed as sad old Dinosaurs unable to live in the present and accept change by the Fitzroy Crowd. Sadly the majority of fandom agreed with that assertion for many reasons. First of all as Miles himself pointed out, the Fitzroy Crowd often do their best to silence critics, (with the largest Doctor Who forums such as Gallifrye Base and the magazine being run by close friends of people like Steven Moffat.) Beyond that many were just thrilled to have Doctor Who back after a long absence, and the revival in all fairness was a good solid show on its own merits for the first 7 or so years. (Though its success was NOT entirely down to its own quality. It did ride high on nostalgia and also got by mostly on characters, concepts created by the original series like the Daleks, the Cybermen, regeneration, which won round the young fans.)
Still sadly as soon as the political side of fandom started to make their desire for a female Doctor known towards the end of Matt Smith’s time, that coupled with the hype from their own success, caused Steven Moffat, and later Chris Chibnall to go further than even other members of the clique. Before the “all about change” mantra was only trotted out now and again by Russell T Davies to silence “the sad anoraks” for things like having the Doctor fall in love with Rose, which was bad enough, but now it became something the Fitzroy Crowd actually believed was the only the way to keep Doctor Who fresh. Lenin once said that a lie repeated enough times eventually becomes accepted as the truth. In this case it was told enough times that even the perpetrators came to believe it!
Now to be clear I do not hate all of the political or for lack of a better term SJW fans of Doctor Who. On the contrary, Claudia Boleyn, a self admitted SJW fan, I have found to be one of the most intelligent, sweet, and lovely people in all of Doctor Who fandom. I regret some of my previous assertions of her on this blog of wanting to undermine male role models in the genre, and have learned not to be too quick to judge others in fandom as a result of my dealings with Claudia.
Still at the end of the day I don’t think that Claudia and others like her had a very positive influence on the show, only in that by their own admission they cared more about their agenda.
They wanted a female Doctor Who, simply because they thought it would be a positive step for female representation. It’s understandable and admirable of people like Claudia to want to see more strong roles for women, but ultimately a female Doctor was never a good way to do it.
As I have pointed out, if you actually DO want to carry on the original series story, then you have to maintain some kind of core identity for the character of the Doctor. Sadly I think a sex change would disrupt that core identity. That’s not to say a woman couldn’t play another hero like the Doctor, but in terms of following on from that specific characters storyline, a woman to me would be too jarring. I personally would have a hard time accepting that it was still William Hartnell under there if the Doctor were played even by an actress I really like, such as Morgana Robinson. Of course for saying this I was smeared as a sexist on sites like Gallifrey Base, but I have been consistent about not changing the Doctors personality too much right the way through in a number of ways. I objected to a romantic Doctor like Tennant, a flirty Doctor talking about his companions skirts being too tight like Matt Smith in his later years, for the same reason of trying to imagine that being Hartnell under there was too much of a stretch. (Well to be fair the last one was just crass anyway.)
The same absolutely would apply in reverse, if you suddenly turned Romana into a man, it would jar. This is not transphobic to say this. On the contrary I’d argue that it is the opposite. Trans people suffer from gender dysphoria where they feel mental anguish at being trapped in the wrong body and go through a long, painful, costly operation and process to become the gender they feel comfortable with. Making out that gender changing is like getting a hair cut, and that as soon as the Doctor physically becomes a woman, he is okay with it mentally after being a man for 100000 years, I’d argue represents a more old fashioned, dated view of gender being an entirely physical process. Hilariously enough Joss Whedon tried to mock those against a female Doctor by stating that the show never revolved around his “big old throbbing dick.” Which is an outright insult to most trans women who keep their male genitals!
The only way a female Doctor would work for me is if it were a remake and the Doctor was written as either female or gender neutral from the start. From a practical point of view there would be absolutely no problem with that, but even then ironically I actually don’t think that would be a good idea from the point of view of female representation.
To me the best form of representation is to use original female characters, as that way women have their own characters, history, stories etc, than hand me downs of male versions.
Sadly however all of these points were ignored I feel by the Claudia Boleyn mob, simply because they saw a female Doctor as too big a chance for representation due to the characters worldwide fame. Also I do think that a lot of SJWs incorrectly believe that the sci fi fandom is something of a little boys only club that needed taken down a peg or too, and again a female Doctor seemed like a great chance to stick it to these guys. (Hence why so many articles when Jodie was announced were just gloating, and why so many SJWs tend to ignore great, original female heroes like Xena, Kelly Maxwell etc who being original can’t make manbabies heads explode. I suppose just like I did with Claudia, then a lot of people on the other side were to quick to lump everyone together as just being sexist manbabies.)
Still it’s not fair to say that the SJWs caused the entire downfall of the show. Whilst I think that the focus on politics and the female Doctor were bad ideas, ultimately they did not need to lead to the vandalisation of the shows past.
IE a female Doctor doesn’t have to lead to William Hartnell no longer being the first Doctor, or the Doctor not being a time lord or anything like that.
To me it was a combination of the politics and the “Doctor Who is all about change” lie and finally the Fitzroy clique’s hold over the franchise and its fandom that collectively have brought us to where we are now. An unprecedented state of desperation where we are actually going backwards in terms of casting the Doctor.
Like I said when the push for a female Doctor really started to become great, and Moffat caved (as unlike the smelly old anorak fans, he actually cared about what the feminists like Claudia Boleyn thought as in his mind they represented the younger generation he wanted to win round.) The all about change mantra was once again used to justify the gender swap, but then I think because Moffat and others saw themselves as “on the right side of history” with having a female Doctor vs the supposedly sexist old traditionalists like yours truly. That subsequently led to Moffat and later Chibnall using the all change is good idea as their main inspiration for keeping Doctor Who fresh (and annoying the sexists) hence the hybrid story, Missy, the Hartnell Doctor being reimagined as a sexual braggard, etc.
In the end they went too far with the Timeless Children. That was a retcon a retcon so ill fitting, so poorly thought out that it pissed off everyone, as it destroyed the identity of both the original and the revived series. Even Elizabeth Sandifier despised the Timeless Children. Sandifier is a truly vile SJW fan, who told me to go kill myself. (Knowing full well I have struggled with mental health problems in the past and have actually tried to kill myself.)
Whilst the revival was always different to the original, it did maintain its own identity from Eccelston to Capaldi, with the Doctor overall in those eras being portrayed as a more romantic, tortured character. Again whilst this was always jarring for classic era fans, since the revival had been a whole generation of fans first introduction to the show, then that was the character of the Doctor for them. I also think that Matt Smith, in spite of some Moffatisms, and Peter Capaldi did help bridge the gap somewhat between old and new fans, by incorporating elements from the classic Doctors into their performances too, like in Matt’s case playing the Doctor as an old man in a young man’s body.
Jodie’s Doctor however first broke even the new who template simply by being a woman, for both male and female new who viewers. Young boys had come to see Doctors like David Tennant as more accessible role models, because they were smart and geeky, and not action men, whilst young girls had come to see the Doctor as a more attractive character. (I’m not having a go at the fangirls for that by the way. Fanboys are the same for female characters like Xena and Buffy. I don’t think the Doctor should have been made into a pin up however, same way I wouldn’t want Miss Marple to be made into a pin up for boys, and I think that both young boys and girls are capable of liking characters that aren’t presented as pin ups as well. Still I blame Russell T Davies for that mindset, rather than the fan girls who simply responded to a character that was meant to be attractive to them.)
Still the gender change already helped disassociate Jodie from both the original and the revival template, but the Timeless Children destroyed and undermined both. Russell T Davies’ last of the time lords story arc was completely undermined by it as he was no longer a Time Lord, as was Matt Smith being the last incarnation as the Doctor now had infinite regenerations, whilst the Doctors rescuing Gallifrey was undermined as it was destroyed yet again etc. New Who fans were every bit as outraged as fans like me, showing that even wit the revival, you still had to have a basic continuity and identity for the Doctor of some kind.
The Timeless Children led to the shows viewers dropping off a cliff, with one Jodie episode pulling in barely above 2 million viewers, the lowest the show has ever received in its 60 year history.
In order to get the fans and even casual viewers back on track, the likes of Chris Chibnall and Russell T Davies were forced to not only completely overshadow Jodie Whittaker in her last ever episode with a shit ton of references and cameos of old Doctors to appeal to nostalgia, but they were forced for the first time in the shows history to actually bring back a previous actor as the current Doctor.
Hilariously enough, Doctor Who has now become the very thing that the commandants of fandoms like Benjamin Cook, youtubers like Samuel Davis and the shills that ran Gallifrey Base always said fans like me who were frightened of change would turn it into.
A continuity obsessed show, constantly harking back to the past, unable to move on, and wallowing in its own mythology to the point where it looks stale, tired and appealing to nostalgia just to get by.
Doctor Who is all about a change. A ming mong, sad, smelly, anorak like me just can’t accept that and is stuck living in the past, not like Chris Chibnall or Russell T Davies who have brought back actors from 1963, crowbarred six old Doctors into a last Doctors episode, and are bringing their lead actor from 2005 back to recapture their glory days.
It’s hilarious and annoying to think that if in hindsight they had only listened to people like me, then they wouldn’t be in this mess.
My and I’d wager most classic era fans ideal version of Doctor Who isn’t one that brings back dozens of characters from the original series in pointless cameos like The Power of The Doctor. I want a Doctor Who series, where the Doctor is written in character. IE where he is an eccentric alien professor, wanting to explore the universe, played by an eccentric character actor, is a renegade time lord, is asexual, dresses in eccentric, over the top, Victorian, Edwardian era clothing etc, and the focus is on adventures, new worlds, monsters, rather than on soap opera and shallow identity politics. That’s it! Whilst I obviously want to see old villains and yes maybe occasionally old characters return, like the Daleks, Cybermen and Master, as I do love those characters, I don’t need to have them back every year. All I do ask is that when they return, you write them in character. You don’t turn the Master into either a Joker knock off like Russell T Davies and Chris Chibnall did, or a River Song/Irene Adler/Tasha Lem knock off like Moffat did. You don’t dick about with their history just for the sake of it, like Moffat did with both the Daleks and the Cybermen. You try and keep some continuity with them, see what kind of story you can write with them that you can’t with other villains etc. The Daleks and the Cybermen’s appearance in The Power of the Doctor was interchangeable. You could remove any of them and it would make no difference.
Had the Fitzroy Clique just done the bare minimum of maintaining the Doctors character and the most basic continuity, then there would have been no need to even reference the past like they have done, other than perhaps in the odd Dalek story every few years. They wouldn’t need to bring back a past Doctor to remind people that “hey this is Doctor Who.”
That’s what always happens when you deviate too far from the identity of something, eventually in order to win people back, you’ll have to remind them again and again that “don’t worry this is the same thing you liked.” How do you do that? With nostalgia and continuity porn and pointless return appearances of old characters. The exact same thing happened with Ghostbusters, that similarly went out of its way to be completely different, only to then do the most unoriginal, nostalgia driven movie with Afterlife to win audiences back.
Ironically my way was better for actually moving Doctor Who forward. Tennant’s return has set an awful precedent for any old Doctor to come back. Hey why even bother taking a risk now when you can just rely on old favourites? Even when the older actors pass on, why not just get someone to impersonate them, like David Bradley as a redux first Doctor? I doubt all the people on forums and sites like Gallifrey Base or Anoraks, or Planet Skaro or Big Glasgow Comic Con, or people like Samuel Davis who hurled abuse at me for daring to suggest that fucking about with the Doctors past for a political agenda was a bad idea, will maybe see that I was right?
Fat chance. The Fitzroy Clique it seems will have a hold over this franchise forever. It made me laugh when I saw Russell T Davies say in an interview he hopes to inspire people who see the show now as children to make it when they are older. He or one of his friends from the tavern will still be making the show in about twenty years, assuming it’s still on.
That’s a large part of why I gave up on the revival, as I realised that the people making it will use any excuse they can not to write proper fucking Doctor Who. At first during the new adventure days as the above quote from Paul Cornell shows, we just weren’t well read and too stupid to get his books. Then we were just stuck in the past, then all change was good, and that by not making it like Doctor Who they were actually making it like Doctor Who, then we were sexist manbabies. I wonder what lie they will come up with next? At the very least hopefully by doing the most unoriginal thing imaginable in bringing back Tennant as the 14th Doctor, the all about change excuse and lie can finally be put to rest.
You start to feel old when the person who was the icon of your youth has been dead for a decade.
Today marks the 10th anniversary of the tragic death of Amy Winehouse, arguably the most iconic and influential British singer/songwriter of the 21st century.
Though her career was short, she left behind an incredible body of work that still resonates with people almost 20 years after it was released.
Whilst today obviously marks a sad anniversary for those who loved Amy, in some ways it can also be seen as a vindication of Amy as an artist.
Here we are ten years on and there is as much interest in this woman as ever. She clearly wasn’t just a flash in the pan, and her music clearly made an impact on people.
Not only are there plenty of people who were just children when Amy died who have become massive fans, but older generations who may have overlooked her at the time as just another modern pop star in life are also discovering her too.
For almost every single year for the past decade, Back to Black has been the best selling album of the 21st century on Vinyl, which has itself made a massive comeback in the past ten years. Despite its newfound popularity Vinyl is still mostly bought by older generations. When you look at the top ten best selling albums on Vinyl ever year, they are mostly made up of bands and singers from the 20th century.
I’m not saying that younger people can’t and don’t enjoy bands and singers from the 60s and 70s. (I do!) Or that modern singers such as Harry Styles don’t make the top ten best selling Vinyl albums. However the top ten singers and bands for other, more modern mediums such as downloads, streaming, even CDs are all modern bands and singers, whilst on Vinyl meanwhile Amy has been the only 21st century artists to crack the top ten every year.
Here is a full rundown of how well Amy’s music has continued to sell across all platforms.
Aside from her music still selling well, there have also been statues and Oscar winning films made about her life in the decade since her passing.
Her influence on other musicians meanwhile is just as strong as ever on both sides of the Atlantic. Prominent British artists to emerge since Amy’s death who cite her as their main or one of their main influences include Sam Smith, Celeste, Laura Mvula, Emeli Sande, whilst artists from other countries around the world to cite her as their main inspiration include Caro Emerald, Lana Del Rey, Alessia Cara,and Millie Bobby Brown.
In spite of this however I can’t help but feel that many tributes, and retrospectives on this important anniversary will probably remember Amy in the wrong way to some extent.
Obviously they will all talk about her talent and impact, but ultimately I can’t help but feel they will maybe make her into too much of a victim.
Amy was treated appallingly by the mainstream media. Her death should serve as a cautionary example of how cruel the industry can be to its stars, and there are many other important issues surrounding the dreadful treatment she received such as mental health being stigmatized, double standards against women. (There is no doubt that had she been a man who lived that kind of lifestyle. She would not have been scrutinized to the same extent.) Finally there is also the hypocrisy from many of the same papers that kicked her in the teeth when she was at her lowest eb, now celebrating her as a misunderstood musical genius.
That said however it is important not to let this shameful treatment from the media, and the tragedy of her early death overshadow her talent and great musical accomplishments.
Sadly the dominant narrative is that Amy was a complete joke during her lifetime and that no-one ever gave her any time until she died. That is complete myth and sadly it has been spread by her fans. I understand why. Her fans are justifiably still upset at the awful way she was treated, and get angry when they see hypocrites like NME now praise her. I myself have focused on the awful treatment she got in previous articles I’ve written about her.
Still ultimately I think that in our grief and anger over losing Amy we have overlooked just how incredible her career was in many respects. Back to Black was one of the best selling albums in the world for three years in a row, broke numerous records in terms of sales and awards all over the world, and made Amy a household name. Furthermore all of her albums were big critical hits too, and the biggest names in music, Tom Jones, The Rolling Stones, Debbie Harry, Paul McCartney, Annie Lennox, Quincy Jones, Tony Bennett, Lady Gaga, Lily Allen, Adele, Florence Welch, even Eminem all expressed interest in working with her and admiration for her talent.
Finally in addition to this she was also cited as an influence by the likes of Adele, Lady Gaga, Florence Welch, Paloma Faith etc, when she was alive.
Whilst there were many tragic things about Amy’s life, artistically it was incredibly fulfilling. She did live to see her music be appreciated by millions of people around the world, make a sizable impact on other singer/songwriters and have the people whose music she had grown up with like Tony Bennett, Quincy Jones and even Stevie Wonder all express admiration for her.
Sadly however I’d wager you will see very few articles mentioning this today. Instead most of them will be along the lines of “how we failed Amy Winehouse.” “Amy Winehouse is a lesson for the way the media treats women.” “How could we have saved Amy”. etc, with only a passing mention of her accomplishments.
Even worse is the fact that her talent is skipped over in many of these articles too. Amy was more than just a great soul singer. She was incredibly versatile. She could cover many different genres from Jazz to Soul to Reggae and she could sing more than just sad, downbeat songs about heartbreak.
She was incredibly funny and witty and many of her songs are actually quite humorous such as “I Head Love Is Blind” and “Fuck Me Pumps.” Others are quite upbeat fun dance songs like her cover Valerie, Amy Amy Amy meanwhile is a lively sexy song.
To simply write Amy off as another tortured artist I think does her a disservice. It overlooks her versatility, her wit and amazing sense of humour, and her passion for and extensive knowledge of music which allowed her to pick out such a wide range of songs to cover. Everything from classics by the Beatles and Billie Holiday to contemporary hits like Valerie.
Obviously I am not saying that articles exploring how Amy was mistreated are inappropriate and don’t have their place, and I’d be hypocritical if I didn’t acknowledge that I have written similar articles in the past. Still I think now after 10 years we can maybe try and remember Amy in a way that she would probably rather be remembered. Not simply as a victim off the media, but also as a pioneering, accomplished singer/songwriter in her own right.
We love strong women, until they express opinions we don’t like, then we’ll make sure they are never heard from again.
It was announced that Lucas Films will be dismissing Gina Carano from her role in the Star Wars series The Mandalorian after her recent comments on Instagram were deemed offensive.
Sadly it came as no surprise to those of us who had been following the controversy surrounding Carano and the vicious attempts to derail her career from self indulgent, self righteous keyboard warriors, but I think this should be the final straw for cancel culture.
Carano is ironically everything the SJWs who have ruined her life claim to support. She is a strong woman who has enjoyed tremendous success in many different forms of entertainment from MMA (where she was a pioneer for women) to film and television.
Yet now not only has she lost the most high profile role of her career, but she has also been dropped by her agent and smeared in the mainstream media by Lucas films as being intolerant of other people’s religious beliefs and cultures.
Her career is in tatters for simply expressing some opinions outside of the show on her social media accounts.
In 2020, Carano simply refused to express support for Black Lives Matter. She didn’t condemn them completely, she simply did not want to be associated with them. Whilst there are obviously problems with police brutality and racism in America, BLM have proven time and time again to be a violent and extreme organisation.
At least up to 25 people lost their lives during the Black Lives Matters riots in 2020. For Carano not to want to associate with BLM is perfectly reasonable. It does not mean that she is a racist. At no point in her entire decade plus long career has Carano ever been accused of anything even remotely racist by any of her coworkers or fans, or been shown to have problems working with people from all ethnicities.
Suddenly however because she doesn’t want to express support for a violent organisation that means she must be tarred as a racist? That would be as absurd as me saying anyone who doesn’t support Scottish independence is a racist. (Less so actually as at least the SNP haven’t been responsible for mass riots that have killed people!)
Later in the year the woke Star Wars brigade demanded that Carano put her pronouns in her profile. (It does make me laugh how the woke fans will often comment on things like “fan entitlement”. I have never seen a more entitled group of cry bullies, than those who think they can actually demand an actor in a series do something or else there will be consequences. I guess they only like strong women as long as they aren’t too strong and think for themselves like Carano.)
Ultimately Carano refused as she thought it was stupid. At no point did she say she was against trans rights, or trans people, or anything like that. (She made that perfectly clear by stating that she supports trans lives.)
By simply not sticking her pronouns in her bio however, she was smeared as a transphobe! She later lightly poked fun at her critics by writing “beep, boop, bop” in her bio which led to numerous petitions and messages to Lucas films from angry Star Wars “fans” to fire Gina Carano.
The campaign continued relentlessly for months, during which time Carano expressed her opinion that the US election had been stolen from Trump. (I personally don’t agree, but it wouldn’t be the first time someone has made such an accusation. Lets not forget the conspiracy theories that are still ongoing about Russia stealing the election from Hillary Clinton in 2016 which other actors involved in the Star Wars franchise like Mark Hamill regularly tweeted about and supported yet faced no consequences for, as they shouldn’t of course, but you can see a double standard right away.)
Carano also expressed doubt about wearing masks to combat the COVID epidemic.
Finally the killing blow to Carano’s career came when she said that in some ways the treatment Republicans are getting is similar to what the Jewish population went through in Nazi Germany.
Here is Carano’s post.
Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers but by their neighbours… even by children… Because history is edited, most people today don’t realise that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbours hate them simply for being Jews. How is that any different from hating someone for their political views.
Now personally I think that she is being hyperbolic. It is true that politics have become so divided in America that people are turning on even their own family members, never mind neighbours.
Still even then it is inappropriate to compare things now to the horrors of Nazi Germany (though once again the woke brigade started this with their rants about how Trump is literally Hitler.)
Let’s all get ready to sink Sarah Silberman’s career for trivializing Hitler and the Nazis 1.2.3.4
Sadly however this proved to be too much for Lucas films and they finally caved to the irrational, bullying mob of keyboard warriors and within a few hours, Carano’s backstabbing agent also dropped her.
Here is the statement released by Lucas films.
“Her (Carano) social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable,”
At no point has Carano ever denigrated anyone based on their cultural or religious identities. At no point has Carano even discussed religion. This is a bare faced lie designed to make impartial people who might only glance at the story think that Carano has been peddling racist and bigoted comments about Jewish people.
You have to ask why are Lucas films deliberately lying and misrepresenting her comments? Could it be because if they reported what she has actually said, fair minded and rational people wouldn’t have a problem? They might not necessarily agree (which I don’t with her comments about Trump and Republicans to be fair.) However they wouldn’t want to completely ruin the woman, which is what has happened now with even her own agent abandoning her.
What we are seeing is history repeat itself, but rather than Nazism, it is a modern day reverse McCarthyism. In the 1950s Senator Joseph McCarthy whipped up hysteria in the industry and among the public against the threat of communism. Anyone with even the mildest left wing views was tarred as the most extreme thing, a communist supporter of Joseph Stalin and they were fired from their jobs and blacklisted so they could never work again.
Many prominent actors, writers and directors careers were derailed for years, or finished completely and many people’s lives were destroyed as a result of McCarthyism.
Hilariously and tragically we are now seeing the left do exactly the same thing in reverse in the 2020s. Anyone who expresses even the mildest right wing views, or literally doesn’t dance to the pathetic whims of some sad sack fans who think they own the franchise is ruined.
Personally I think it’s time that the cowards who constantly cave to these bullies were held accountable. I think Carano’s agent should be named and shamed in the media for stabbing her in the back during her lowest eb. Other potential clients need to see what a cowardly Judas Carano’s agent is. I also think there should be a boycott of any future seasons of The Mandalorian and anything by those who decided to both fire and smear Carano in the media as “disrespecting other people’s religions” until either Carano is reinstated or Lucas films make a public apology.
(I think Carano should sue them for their comments if they don’t retract.)
It’s not simply enough to ignore SJWs anymore. They need to be shown that they can’t just ruin people’s lives and careers. Any time their toxic influence is imposed over a franchise, that franchise needs to be made to fail. People need to see that if they try and blacklist someone for their views, they will be the ones to face the consequences.
I’m sure some people will say this is hypocritical as now I am demanding a boycott, but this is not because of opinions Lucas films expressed. Plenty of celebrities I adore express opinions I don’t like. Lady Gaga supported Joe Biden, who I believe to be a creeper, war criminal and a blow to genuine progressive politics. Not once did I even criticise Lady Gaga for that, never mind attempt to ruin her career and smear her personally as the worst thing I could think of.
Lucas films have ruined Carano’s life. Not only have they fired her (Which always in ever area, makes it difficult for someone to find work after.) But they have smeared her in the media as disrespecting people’s religions and cultures, which will stick to her reputation and make others not want to work with her. They cannot be allowed to get away with that, and they cannot be allowed to set a precedent.
That’s what the SJWs don’t seem to get. If we can get someone fired for expressing opinions we don’t like, how long before someone takes offence at something you say?
I personally will never watch an episode of the Mandalorian again unless Carano is offered her job back. (Though if I was her I would spit it back in their faces after the cowardly, backstabbing way they treated her, but at the very least they should apologise and give her the offer.)
I can’t believe that I was actually wanting another Trump victory (only when it became obvious Tulsi Gabbard wasn’t going to be the Dems candidate.)
It’s a testament to how bad things are when out of a country as large as America your choices are between an egocentric, failed businessman and a creepy, warmongering letch.
Joe Biden is now the President Elect of the United States and whilst many progressives over the world are literally cheering in the streets at having finally overthrown the evil tyrant, personally I think this, coupled with Corbyn’s crushing defeat in the United Kingdom is the biggest blow to left wing politics for a long while.
As we’ll see in this article, thanks to Creepy Uncle Joe’s victory, it will be a long time before we see any even remotely left wing candidate near the white house.
The truth about Joe Biden
It makes me sick to see people praise Joe Biden as some kind of progressive champion against the official Demon, Donald Trump.
For the record I dislike Trump. His attempts to undermine Venezuela, his antagonism towards Iran and North Korea, the way he abandoned Julian Assange after praising Wiki leaks during the 2016 election and even his attempts to undermine the NHS in Britain, were all genuine reasons to want him away from the White House.
However that said when it comes to all of the issues that the SJWs accuse Trump of being literally Hitler over such as LGBT rights, civil rights, and misogyny, Biden is at least equal to Trump, if not more conservative on.
For LGBT rights for instance Trump was opposed to gay marriage for years, whilst Joe Biden has not only been opposed to gay marriage for just as long, he has also voted in favour of laws that persecuted gay people throughout his entire career.
Now in all fairness many politicians have changed their stance on progressive issues throughout their careers. Tulsi Gabbard was opposed to gay marriage for many years for instance.
However Tulsi openly admitted and apologised for being opposed to gay marriage, where as creepy uncle Joe (whose views were far more dogmatic and has done more to harm gay rights directly) has lied several times about his record.
In the 2020 debate Biden actually claimed that he was the first person of any administration to go on national television in support of gay marriage.
He even took credit for creating a widespread support for gay marriage among politicians.
And by the way, I might add, I’m the first person to go on national television in any administration and say I supported gay marriage. I supported gay marriage when asked. And so it started a ripple effect.”
The truth however is different. Not only did many Democrats and Republicans support gay marriage before Joe Biden, but Biden has helped persecute gay people in many different areas of life beyond simply their right to marry.
In 1973 Biden stated that gay federal employees were a security risk.
Biden also supported the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy in 1994 which prohibited homosexuals from serving in the military and eventually saw more than 14500 homosexuals excluded from the military.
Later that same year, Biden also voted for an amendment that cut off federal funding for any school district that promoted acceptance of homosexuality as a lifestyle.
As for the issue of gay marriage in 1996 Creepy Uncle Joe also voted against gay marriage, supporting the “Defense of Marriage Act” which defined marriage as only a legal union between one man and one woman as a husband and wife. Biden was just one of 85 senators to vote in favour of the act.
Biden continued to voice his support the Defense of Marriage Act throughtout the entire 2000s, claiming that it was a state issue.
“As President Bush said on a previous occasion, this issue should be left to the states. I agree. That’s why I voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as a ‘union between one man and one woman’ and does not require any state to recognize a same-sex union sanctioned under the laws of another state.“
“You know, think about this. The world’s going to Hades in a handbasket… and we’re going to debate, the next three weeks, I’m told, gay marriage, a flag amendment, and God only knows what else… We already have a law, the Defense of Marriage Act. We’ve all voted—not, where I’ve voted, and others have said, look, marriage is between a man and a woman and states must respect that. Nobody’s violated that law, there’s been no challenge to that law. Why do we need a constitutional amendment? Marriage is between a man and a woman.”
In addition to this Biden also voted to block the immigration of HIV infected individuals into the US in 1993, whilst Biden and Obama also sent over 400 million in cash to the Iranian government, a country that puts homosexuals to death.
Biden meanwhile has just as dodgy a record when it comes to the ladies as Trump.
Biden’s record on civil rights is also somewhat patchy too and involves support for segregationists and the disastrous 1994 Crime Bill that deeply and negatively affected the African American community.
He also hasn’t got the best track record on immigration either. Leaving aside his persecution of those infected with HIV, it was during Biden and Obama’s Presidency that the cages used to hold immigrants during Trump’s time were built and first implemented.
All of this is before we get into Biden’s strong opposition to medicare for all. Far from being on the left, Biden was able to whip up McCarthyite fears against Bernie Sanders due his left wing policies in the media and among the Democratic elite, in much the same way as the British media did against Jeremy Corbyn in 2019.
As you can see Biden is by no means a more progressive candidate on the issues that Trump’s critics despised him over, but ironically he actually has a worse track record on other key issues like foreign policy.
Trump may have imposed sanctions and even launched some illegal attacks on other countries such as Syria, but at the very least Trump is ironically the only President not to launch a full scale illegal invasion of another country or start a war.
Though Trump only served one term, both Bush and Obama had launched illegal wars during their first term. The Iraq war which happened under Bush’s Presidency is the biggest atrocity of the 21st century, whilst the Libyan crisis under Obama saw the complete destruction of a secular Muslim country, the rise of Isis and a refugee crisis.
Nothing Trump did can compare to those two atrocities, which is why this glee over him being defeated from the SJWs comes over as very shallow and ironically insular. It seems for all the SJWs and the media’s claims of wanting to tackle racism and Islamophobia, the destruction of countries in the middle east, the massacre and displacement of hundreds of thousands of Muslims doesn’t bring as much shame to America as Trump saying something sexist to his friends 15 years ago?
This ironically demonstrates how people don’t care about issues that don’t affect their country. It makes me sick to see supposedly left wing people act as though the American President was such a sacred, beautiful, honourable position that was disgraced by an uncouth idiot like Trump.
Ironically Trump is the only President of the past 60 years not to cause an illegal war.
Biden also supported the invasion of Libya as well as invasions of other countries such as Yugoslavia in 1999, and Syria in 2014 and 15.
In addition to this Biden has already, in contrast to Trump created tensions with Putin.
Considering both countries have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the entire planet several times over, the risk of a full scale conflict between both Nations can never be understated.
With this in mind Biden is certainly no alternative to Trump at least, but his victory actually represents a much greater defeat of left wing politics and progressive ideas than simply another republican in the White House.
What Biden’s Win Means For Progessives
Love Lady Gaga, but she is definitely going to regret this. Actually no she won’t as she won’t be those affected by Biden’s opposition to universal healthcare during the upcoming recession.
With Donald J Trump, at least you knew where you stood. He was a right wing candidate who represented the right. The Democrats meanwhile are meant to represent the opposition to the Republicans, and offer at the very least a more liberal alternative.
Ultimately however the Democrats have become every bit as corrupt and right wing as the Republicans, and a Joe Biden victory has simply helped to secure the very worst hawks in the Democrat party’s power.
The Democrats needed another humiliating defeat. Their lost to Trump in 2016, evidently didn’t convince them that they needed to find a candidate more in line with the people, which Hillary most certainly wasn’t.
Biden is really no different to Hillary Clinton. Both war mongers, both flip floppers, both establishment candidates who were backed one hundred percent by the crooked mainstream media.
Two losses to an outsider candidate, which ultimately Trump was, would have forced the Democrats to pick a better candidate in 2024. They’d know that an outsider was a genuine threat, and that they couldn’t just pick a candidate that only care about their interests instead of at least some of the voters.
I’m not saying they would have picked a Bernie or a Tulsi Gabbard (though certainly Tulsi’s chances would have been better.) At the very least I think they probably have had to have picked a candidate that supported universal health care which is a very important issue for the electorate.
Now however thanks to Biden’s win, the Democrats have no reason to actually try and win genuine support from the electorate. They know that they can just whip up enough fear of the Republican candidate to convince people “Well at least I won’t be voting for someone who is literally Hitler”. In truth however by voting for Biden, they are voting for someone who is at least as right wing as Trump, yet is on the opposition’s side meaning that no matter who you vote for, you have a candidate opposed to universal health care and other left wing issues.
We are now further away from a candidate like Tulsi Gabbard, a genuinely anti war candidate who supported universal healthcare than we were in 2016.
Furthermore Biden’s failings will not be as scrutinised as Trump’s were. Just as with Obama, the public will become complacent again. (Don’t expect our brave, edgy comedians to comment on Biden in the same way, even if he starts another war. The Libyan crisis went almost unnoticed by the media for instance compared to Trump’s idiotic tweets.)
Trump’s victory now looks like just a fluke, rather than the people pushing back against the corruption in the Democrats party, and the influence of the mainstream media. The establishment needed two defeats to really get the message that people were fed up of not being listened too across, but now their power has been solidified.
Either the corrupt candidates in the Democrat party will know they can just whip up fear of the Republicans again in 2024, or the Republicans will win after the public’s frustration with four years of Sleepy Joe. This time however the Republicans will also not want an outsider candidate either due to Trump’s failure.
Trump as awful as he was, did at least represent a shake up of the status quo to both political parties, that someone from the outside can win if they appeal to what the people actually want, and the more the media try to demonise them, the more the people turn against the media.
Now however the Republicans are more likely to choose a George W Bush type figure than they are a Trump.
Conclusion
It’s always worse when the opposition is completely taken over by the right, than if a right wing party simply wins an election. I view Keir Starmer’s recent purge of Corbyn’s influence over the Labour Party to be far more catastrophic than a simple Tory win, as now there really is no one to vote for.
Sleepy Joe is not a progressive candidate. He is a trojan horse designed to dupe progressives into thinking that he is, because at least he’s not Trump, but ultimately he will carry on the same right wing policies as Trump, and possibly be even worse on issues like foreign policy, all the while the media will be propping him up as a great man.
Of course some people doubt that Biden will last the full term, but his Vice President Kamala Harris is every bit as corrupt and right wing.
It will be a long, long while before we get anything even approaching a candidate like Tulsi Gabbard, and sadly it felt like we were getting closer than ever. Trump’s victory was a blow to the establishment, even if he didn’t live up to his non interventionist stance.
His victory felt like the first positive step to seeing an outsider candidate like Tulsi or Bernie get in on the Democrats side, but now things have just returned to the status quo, with Trump’s victory being nothing more than a fluke that didn’t last.
In yet another fine example of why the foaming at the mouth left and right are exactly the same thing, the right have recently supported a boycott of Disney’s reboot of Mulan.
The reason, its leading actress Liu Yifei expressed support for the Hong Kong police against the rioters on social media.
“I support the Hong Kong police. You can beat me now. What a shame for Hong Kong,”
Naturally many of the anti SJWs who are normally opposed to cancel culture, who stood up for Gina Carano when SJWs tried to get her fired from another Disney production, The Mandolarin simply for expressing a political opinion, are either as silent as ghosts for Liu Yifei, or are actually supporting the boycott against her.
See here from a youtuber named JosiahRises who is normally opposed to Cancel Culture.
Meanwhile here are his opinions about SJWs getting people banned.
I guess freedom of speech doesn’t apply for Liu Yifei whose career he has been happy to help torpedo.
Now you might be thinking that I am being hypocritical as I dislike the politics in the Jodie Whittaker era of Doctor Who and have openly criticised it, but to start with not once have I called on Jodie or any of the cast to be blacklisted and second I dislike how the politics are implemented into the series itself.
It’s not a question of Jodie said some things online that I disagree with and I won’t watch the show. I dislike the way that the politics in the series take precedence over the story, the way that characters like the Doctor and the Masters backstories are being rewritten and destroyed simply for a political agenda etc.
With Liu meanwhile the backlash against her, doesn’t even have anything to do with the film. It is simply because she expressed an opinion the anti SJWs don’t like outside of her work on the film, that they want to ruin her.
And they are trying to ruin her. They are helping to make her the fall figure for the film’s poor box office performance. I haven’t seen the film. It may be another bland, boring, pointless reboot and I certainly have no love for Disney. That’s the point however this will not harm Disney in the long run. All that will happen is that Disney will instead pin all of the blame on Liu Yifei thanks to the boycott against her comments. What other film studio will want to hire her if it’s known that people won’t even give her performances a chance because of her political opinions? She has more or less been blacklisted already. She hasn’t been judged on her acting, she hasn’t even been judged on the quality of the film she starred in.
There’s no doubt that Liu had expressed a support for the American police against Black Lives Matter, or criticised identity politics, or said there are only 2 genders and if it were rabid SJW fans like Mr Tardis Reviews calling for her to be boycotted, people like JosiahRises would be white knighting for her and calling her a badass standing up for free speech.
Essentially the anti SJWs, or the right are exactly the same as those they rally against. Both can’t stand contrary opinions. The only difference is that the left currently have more social and cultural power, so the right seem like the under dogs. Furthermore in regards to the sci fi and fantasy fandom, the left are currently the fanatics destroying major franchises like Doctor Who and Star Trek, so many otherwise impartial people will side with the right, assuming they are at least more reasonable.
In time however this dynamic could easily shift and when it does as seen with Liu anyone who expresses an opinion the right, the apparent advocates of free speech don’t like will be silenced without any hint of irony.
The smearing of Liu as a communist is also classic SJW behaviour too. SJWs will smear anyone who disagrees with them in the slightest as the most extreme thing, Nazis, alt right, misogynists etc.
(I have been a victim of this as my latest article on the toxicity in the Doctor Who fandom attests, where I was smeared as a misogynistic alt right shill on Gallifrey Base, compared to Mussolini and told to kill myself by Elizabeth Sandifier, a notorious SJW lunatic for criticising the Jodie Whittaker era.)
The right meanwhile have proven to be no better the way they smear almost anyone as a communist if they express even the mildest left wing views or contrary opinions, like Liu being critical of the protesters.
The Hong Kong protests were a somewhat complicated issue that was like many others stoked up by fake news and political opportunists.
Yet because China is seen as a communist country. (In reality its economic system is somewhat more complicated than that.) Then anyone who defends its actions in any situation like Liu must automatically be a dirty communist in the rights eyes.
Even if like Liu they are opposed to things the right claim to be against, like violent protests, fake news sowing division, then it doesn’t matter. If all of those things are applied to dirty Commies, then the right view it as a good thing!
I remember seeing Dave Cullen, a notorious right wing youtuber who spent an entire year trashing CNN for their biased coverage of Clinton and Trump, cite CNN as a reference against the Hong Kong police.
Liu isn’t the only victim of the right’s dogma however. ShoeOnHead a popular left of centre youtuber was recently smeared as a socialist/communist for simply associating with a socialist on youtube.
It’s funny that Sargon of all people who has associated with the likes of Yaron Brook,a notorious right winger who wants to destroy the NHS and Stefan Molyneux, a race realist, who has made deranged posts about women, would criticise Shoe on the basis of who she associates with.
You can see how the right have the same tribalistic attitude that the left have of you’re either with us or against us?
I’ve often said that ideologies like capitalism and socialism have replaced religion in terms of being a dogmatic cult that people will adhere to regardless of principles.
Why can’t politics be viewed in a more impartial, logical way? I wouldn’t say I am a complete socialist in that I don’t believe in handing over all power to the government. I think that in this scenario the government ends up replacing the large co-operations that are able to dominate in an unchecked capitalist environment.
I am more than happy for independent businesses that manufacture their own products to remain free. However I agree with many socialist policies like universal health care, welfare, I believe in renationalising the roads, railways, resources like gas and electricity.
I think Capitalism is extremely flawed as a system, and it has not only caused an incredible loss of life around the world, but even in the countries it is deemed a success, Britain and America, it is crashing and burning. Covid has accelerated the downfall of the system, but even before then poverty rates and unemployment were shockingly bad. (Particularly among the disabled.)
Now again I’m not saying there aren’t problems in China in regards to free speech and censorship. Obviously there are, but that doesn’t mean that the economic model in China hasn’t been successful. Also once again America and Britain are hardly squeaky clean when it comes to free speech. Ask Julian Assange, if he ever gets released, or hasn’t been broken by the physical and mental torture he has endured.
For saying all of these things however I would probably be labelled a dirty communist by your average right wing shit lord, the same way the lovely people on Gallifrey Base accused me of being a disgusting woman hating alt right piece of shit.
Both view their political ideologies as religions and will defend them regardless of whether or not it violates their beliefs. Hence Sargon lambasting the left for canonizing Fidel Castro a brutal dictator, whilst praising Agusto Pinochet, a brutal dictator, or Dave Cullen warning us about fake news about Trump from CNN and then using CNN’s reports of China a proof of how corrupt it is, or JosiahRises warning us about cancel culture, whilst using cancel culture to smear and blacklist an actress who said something supportive about those pesky commies.
At the end of the day you should always stick up for what you believe in regardless of whether the cult like political mob you have chosen to associate with is for or against it. If you truly are against cancel culture, and for freedom of speech then you will have to support Liu Yifei who is as much a victim of cancel culture as Gina Carano.
I will continue to support both actresses because I am opposed to cancel culture regardless. Let’s see how many right wingers who are willing to do the same
In the past few articles of this series we explored how a certain fandom incrowd consisting of Russell T Davies, Steven Moffat, Mark Gatiss, Gary Russell, Paul Cornell, Chris Chibnall, Nicholas Briggs (often nicknamed the Fitzroy Crowd as they all used to congregate at the Fitzroy pub) were able to slowly take over the Doctor Who franchise during the 90s when it was vulnerable, and bully their critics into silence as “Ming Mongs” and anoraks.
But if all this monkey-posturing sounds absurd, then let’s put in the context of the late ’90s / early 2000s. You may remember a time, in the days before “Doctor Who fans” meant thirteen-year-olds, when the Virgin / BBC novels actually seemed important. The authors certainly thought they were important, and pride was their most valued possession. After all, the reason I gained a reputation as an unhealthy influence was that I broke what Keith Topping called “the unspoken code”, the Omerta-like law which held that New Adventures writers should all stick together in the face of fandom and not publicly criticise each others’ work. I say “Omerta”, but in practice, they behaved more like Medieval overlords than mafiosa: the elite have to form a united front, because otherwise, they’ll be revealed as weak, flabby individuals and the peasants will get ideas above their station. Oh, and you’re the peasants, by the way. When the new series began, those authors who were promoted to scriptwriter-level went from “overlords” to “royalty”, which is why my heartless attack on Mark Gatiss was received with the same shock as if a small-time landowner in the Middle Ages had just referred to the Prince of the Realm as a big spaz.
You think I’m exaggerating…? Then consider this. When Paul Cornell took me to task for the social faux-pas of having opinions, he seemed appalled that I was incapable of respecting the natural hierarchy, and asked whether there was anybody I ‘bent the knee’ to. Bent the knee…? What is this, geek feudalism? When I told him that I had no interest in serving or reigning, he asked me: ‘Do your followers know that?’ I found it horrifying that anyone could even think that way, and I still do.”
–Lawrence Miles
“I do worry about being surrounded by yes-men. You’re right, it happens. […] I don’t think it’s happened to me yet. In the end, just as good writers are hard to find, so are good script editors, good producers and good execs. When you find good people like Julie and Phil, their sheer talent cancels out the risk of them yes-ing. I suppose the danger is not RTD And The Yes-Men, but a triumverate of people who are so similar that contrary opinions don’t get a look-in.”
–Russell T Davies
In this article we are going to explore how Doctor Who fandom has become cult like, and how the combination of this and toxic identity politics has made the franchises fandom so poisonous that it threatens to destroy the series itself. Not only have the truly toxic fans had an influence on the show itself, but they have also made all Doctor Who forums, and even editing what are supposed to be factual articles on Doctor Who websites insular and dogmatic to the point where I can’t imagine many people having time for the franchise anymore.
What happens on Gallifrey Base when someone disagrees with a piece of received wisdom from the Fitzroy Crowd. Cheers Jon Blum.
All fandoms can be dogmatic. All fandoms have people who are self loathers, who are sticklers for tradition, who are abusive to other fans etc.
With Doctor Who however as Lawrence Miles has pointed out it goes beyond that. The Fitzroy Crowd (particularly Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat) are elevated to the position of royalty simply because they made Doctor Who popular again for a few years in the 00s.
We have already explored how the vile treatment Doctor Who received from the mainstream media in the 90s and 00s, bred a kind of desperation in fans to see the show accepted again above all else, even it was no longer the same show in any way shape or form, just as long as the brand of Doctor Who wasn’t targeted by shallow, moronic comedians on panel shows, then that was all that mattered.
Sadly Davies and Moffat used this to create a special kind of loyalty to the point where any criticism of them and their writing, no matter how measured and fair is viewed almost as heresy by certain quarters of fandom. “These were the men who delivered Doctor Who to glory. If you go against anything they say, you’re the type that would drag us back to the dark days of the 1990s.”
Now fair enough in response to this, both Moffat and Davies have received very dedicated haters, who yes have gone too far at certain points in their abuse of Davies and Moffat.
Still I feel that this wouldn’t happen if Doctor Who fandom were allowed to reflect a wider range of opinions.
Criticise anything about Davies and Moffat’s tenures on sites like Gallifrey Base and you will be either be dogpiled on, insulted, or eventually banned. It seems we must all learn to bend the knee.
The addition of identity politics meanwhile has just made the cult like mentality all the worse.
From about 2010-13 Steven Moffat was viciously slandered by radical feminists and regressive leftists.
Again I’m not by any measure right wing, but I do have problems with the more extreme examples of the left and their influence on fandom. They often paint themselves as simply wanting stronger roles for women and minorities, when in truth they often want to impose their own political agendas beyond that on works of fiction that should be for everyone.
They also often ironically want to divide people by race, gender and sexuality and define them entirely by those aspects of their personality.
A for lack of a better term SJW series, is not simply a series starring black people, or women, or LGBT people, which no one but a genuine bigot would have a problem with. It’s a series filled with explicit anti men material, that focuses more on making tired, cliched political points than in telling a good story. (No one is saying you can’t include politics in fiction, but the story itself still has to hold up on its own.)
It will also present its female, minority characters as tokens and trophies than as characters.
An example of this type of series is the CW’s Supergirl., which I think serves as quite a good contrast with series like Xena, Red Dwarf, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Charmed none of which would be called SJW series, despite starring black, female, and LGBT leading characters.
Sadly as soon as the SJWs started to smear Moffat he caved. The reason they were able to get through to him, unlike Classic era fans was because the regressive leftists represent a young, hip, millenial audience to the Fitzroy Clique that they hope to win favour with. As they are all middle aged, it’s natural that they would want to make sure they don’t lose the young crowd. Of course there are plenty of middle aged SJWs and plenty of young classic era fans (including yours truly.)
Still Moffat and the rest of the Fitzroy Crowd held that mindset and so they went along with what the regressive left wanted for the series from the start of the Capaldi era onwards.
Here are examples of the SJWs vicious smear campaign against Moffat, as well as responses from Moffat and others to show it bothered them.
Moffat’s “followers” as Paul Cornell would refer to them as, naturally followed suite when he started to embrace political correctness and unfortunately this just allowed them to bully dissenters to a greater extent than ever before.
Now they could smear you as a racist, a sexist, a homophobe over simply not liking the latest incarnation of the series, rather than simply a ming mong or not a true fan.
Here are a list of responses I received on Gallifrey Base to give you an example of the shows toxic fandom. The post in question that triggered these charming responses was simply asking posters how they’d fix Doctor Who. I mentioned decanonizing the revival, and not pandering to political correctness and the Gallifrey Base posters were not happy.
“It would seem burronjor finds the Thirteenth Doctor a sexually dominating figure and that makes him uncomfortable. I’d suggest his anxiety about that is more a matter for himself and a professional working in confidence, rather than for the BBC to make changes to accommodate. I mean they don’t even take strobe lighting off shows to accommodate people with photo-sensitive epilepsy – they just give a warning. Accommodating people who have fringe sexual hang ups they’re uncomfortable with, so they’re not triggered, isn’t very practical.”
“Whiny little bigot, when we see women or non-whites promoted to primary hero figures, that’s enough for manbabies like you to bitch and moan about how oppressed they are.”
I never once said I had a problem with women or non whites being promoted to primary hero figures. Would I have written articles like this if I did?
(Just to be clear I don’t know Dana Delorenzo. She tweeted this because she liked my idea of her playing Amy Winehouse.)
I got that response from simply criticising the Jodie Whittaker era.
“I can only say, having been a fan since 1977 and an active member of this forum and its predecessor since 2003 you are, quite simply, the worst Doctor Who fan I’ve ever encountered.”
“I could point you to exactly the video in which Bowlestrek is Islamophobic but I don’t want to contribute to monetizing the **** any more.”
I don’t watch Bowlestrek’s videos anymore. I used to watch some of his videos, but he ended up becoming stuck too much in the angry guy mode. I also thought his recent tweets about Jodie being ugly were nasty and childish. That said he is not a white supremacist or a racist, and the constant smearing of him as a bigot has I think led to him being more aggressive in his videos and tweets. (He certainly wasn’t as aggressive in his earlier videos.)
“There are loons on both sides, yes. You’re one of them.”
“You sound awfully threatened by inclusive casting. I genuinely think this is where a lot of this anger towards Jodie’s casting comes from – loss of privilege feels awfully like discrimination don’t you think?”
“Understand? Of course you do. Because you know all this, and you know the difference in society between then and now. You’re just trying to justify yourself because you don’t like diverse casting in a show you think should belong to you.”
“All I see is you ranting a load of alt-right rubbish. The show is exactly the same as it’s always been.
What’s changed is people like have been radicalised by extremists and trolls on line. You hide behind your racism and sexism by pretending writers have been bullied into creating rubbish characters.”
“It was about as mature, sophisticated and eloquent a response as the fetid maggot-strewn rubbish that you’ve been posting actually merits. Perhaps even more so, but I’m feeling generous.”
“But is that your Mam shouting to tell you that your tea’s ready? Best run along now, before your fish finger butties go cold.”
“I don’t think bynnojor is really interested in discussion ,or facts, or really anything than spewing his ignorant, vial hatred and dated alt-right nastiness all over the place. All the usual points, all the usual “pretending to be reasonable”, all the usual SJW, woke, buzz words. It’d be a parody but people like this do esist, and they are delude din the belief that they are some kind of majority. They just want to exist ina world of hatred where women and PoC are only featured if they keep in their places.”
Hilariously enough after this tirade of abuse I was banned for life for my supposed bad behaviour.
Gallifrey Base is far from the only site that will abuse and then ban you if you dare to question anything that the Fitzroy Crowd have said however.
On the website TV Tropes and Idioms I was banned simply for editing their article about the Doctor Who villain The Master.
TV Tropes article about the Master states that he and the Doctor had always had a romantic relationship with one another. (As do other articles on their site.)
I simply edited in the truth about the characters development in the Classic era. Originally the Master was going to be revealed to be the Doctors brother. Roger Delgado who played the Master himself thought up this idea and Jon Pertwee who played the Doctor liked it, as did Barry Letts the co-creator of the character.
They were going to reveal that the Master was the Doctors brother in Delgado’s final story, The Long Game, but tragically Delgado was killed in a car accident before this story could be made.
Barry Letts would later oversee producer John Nathan Turner’s first season as producer. He filled JNT in on the backstory of the character of the Master, including the idea that he was the Doctors brother.
JNT liked the idea and hinted at it throughout his era. He even came close to revealing it in Planet of Fire, but cut the scene at the last minute because he wanted to leave the mystery about both characters past open.
You can find an interview with Jon Pertwee on the Planet of the Spiders DVD where he talks about this, and says that as far as he is concerned the Master and the Doctor are brothers, and that’s the only way their relationship makes sense.
Barry Letts in the same docu confirms this. Peter Davison meanwhile on the Planet of Fire DVD confirms that JNT believed the Doctor and the Master to be brothers and almost revealed it in the Planet of Fire.
These are simple, easily verifiable facts and for writing them into the Master’s article on TV Tropes I was banned for life from the site.
The reason for that is because TV Tropes are very biased towards the Moffat era and the revival overall. Steven Moffat and Russell T Davies, “ship” the Doctor and the Master.
Quite why you would want to ship the Doctor with a genocidal, sadistic, mass murdering monster who was envisioned as being the Doctors BROTHER, I have no idea, but again because Davies and Moffat say it (and wrote it into their versions of the character) a lot of their “followers” bent the knee and not only say that is how their relationship is now, but insist that it was always the case to make sure Davies and Moffat’s versions don’t stand out.
Steven Moffat in particular always insisted that his version of the Master, Missy channeled Roger Delgado, the original Master. This was undoubtedly because Missy was the first female Master, so in order for her to be a success, Moffat not only claimed she was in line with the others, but actually MORE faithful to the original than the other male Masters were.
It was a bold move, but it doesn’t hold up to anyone who has seen even 2 seconds of Delgado’s Master.
Delgado Master
MASTER: How well you know me, Doctor! Now come on, smarten yourselves up. We want to look our best for a royal audience, you know.
JO: He’s very confident.
MASTER: Well, Miss Grant, as an Earth poet once said, ‘My strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is pure’. Come on, you fellows, let me out! Your Emperor is waiting to see me.
Missy
MISSY: Well, yes, of course it is. I mean, how would you ever find your glasses? Or the little girl’s room? And what if you kissed an ugly?
I think a lot of SJWs also adopted the Master and the Doctor together as gay icons, which is silly as their relationship isn’t exactly a positive representation of gay relationships.
Naturally writing in the actual FACT that the Master and Doctor were meant to be brothers completely destroys the entire Master/Doctor shipping crap, and shows just how unfaithful Moffat and Davies’ versions the character were. Even if you like Missy, if you are being truthful you have to write that she was a huge deviation which Davies and Moffat’s followers aren’t prepared to do, so I had to be banned.
Here is the conversation I had with a mod named Fighteer who both insulted and banned me.
After this I was still able to log on, via an old account. I then tried to edit another article on their site about pandering to the base and included Steven Moffat’s attempts to pander to the extreme feminist side of his audience (which I backed up with facts.) Once again I was banned.
I foolishly tried to sort out my differences there with a new account in a discussion page, and backed up everything I had said about Moffat’s pandering with verifiable sources, only to be insulted and banned yet again. Not only that I also brought up the issue on the discussion page of the article in a civil and reasonable way (again with sources,) only to have what I wrote deleted after I was banned, in an effort to make sure no one could read my points.
Here is my latest confrontation with the people who desperately want the Doctor to sleep with his evil, xenophobic, twisted brother.
You can see how none of them are able to answer my question?
Instead it’s just all insults, calling me a crushing bore, telling me I lack the moral high ground, because I ban evaded and “I WANT TO SPEAK TO THE MANAGER”. In regards to the ban evasion I was upfront about it. What else was I to do? I was banned unfairly for stating an objective FACT, just because it flew in the face of a mods infantile shipping agenda.
Fighteer demonstrated remarkable maturity by stating this after banning me again.
Well, that’s fun. Bye, ban evader. By the way, I feed on your hatred. It makes me more powerful.
Ironically this sounds like something the Master from the classic era, who was depicted as a controlling megalomaniac would say.
DOCTOR: The Master’s consumed with hatred. It’s his one great weakness. MASTER: Ha. Weakness, Doctor? Hate is strength.
This is where posting FACTS will get you on a DW site. It wasn’t even as though in regards to the Master I posted anything controversial. It was literally just a description of what Barry Letts and Jon Pertwee and Roger Delgado all wanted the character to be, yet because it didn’t fit in with Moffat’s kinky Mary Poppins version, that was enough for me to be insulted, smeared as a misogynist, a bore, a trouble maker and get banned three times!
Sadly the same would undoubtedly be true on other sites. If you were to edit the wikipedia article on the Master to include the knowledge that the Master was supposed to be the Doctors brother and mention how the character has changed over the years, (the way that other articles do about villains like the Joker.) A Moffat fan or a rabid SJW would most likely remove your edits without any kind of proper discussion and ban you as a trouble maker, a homophobe and a sexist.
A part of me wonders if future releases of Planet of the Spiders or Planet of Fire will even include the interviews with Letts and Pertwee and Davison, talking about the Masters origins? If they do, then people will know how unfaithful Missy is. (They’d know that just by watching the original Masters, but still you can’t even argue that the romance was a subtext with this in mind.)
I can easily imagine these extras and interviews being left on the cutting room floor, and all official articles on tv tropes, wikipedia being edited and monitored to make sure Moffat’s and Davies’ versions aren’t as ridiculously out of place as they seem. (Even though they still are.)
Similarly on the Planet Skaro Forum I was banned for stating the facts about the smear campaign about Steven Moffat. Ironically I had only come to the forum in the first place because someone insulted me after I had posted a link to a particular thread a few times (as examples of Moffat’s disdain for the original series.)
A poster accused me of being “the worlds angriest Scot” (as though my Scottish heritage has anything to do with my arguments?) When I explained myself, and again posted links to my arguments, the mods blocked me and sent me a private message calling me a stupid prick.
One of the worst individual examples of toxic fandom meanwhile has to be Elizabeth Sandifier, a popular blogger.
Sandifier has always been a somewhat irrational, bullying figure. (She has a page on LOL Cows for a reason.)
I personally had a clash with her when she obsessively went through a number of my posts on The Hive and started stalking me on twitter. (She accused me of being alt right, a sexist and encouraged people to mock my original fiction.)
When I confronted her on her accusations, and asked her to name me ONE thing I had said that was sexist or alt right, she called me a sexist cockwomble and blocked me.
Two years later, after the debacle of the Timeless Children which Sandifier hated (it seems that was too far even for the cult like New Who fans.) I decided to offer an olive branch and left a comment on her blog saying that we needed to ditch the Doctor Who is all about change narrative.
She responded by telling me to get the fuck off of her blog. When I told her that was a childish response and she should grow up, she posted a song telling me to kill myself.
I suffer from severe chronic depression as anyone who follows this blog (or looked obsessively at my posts on the Hive as she did) would know. I have been open about my struggle with it for years. Almost every single year this blog has been delayed at some point due to my frequent bouts of severe depression.
Yet Sandifier would send me a song saying “KILL YOURSELF, KILL YOURSELF, KILL YOURSELF DON’T DELAY.” When I pointed out to Sandifier my struggle with mental health problems and how inappropriate it was, she responded by deleting my comment talking about my struggles with mental health, but leaving the comment telling me to kill myself.
Essentially she wanted to taunt me about killing myself, but not get into trouble for it with her woke friends, so she deleted the comment that showed she was taunting someone with mental health problems, rather than the comment taunting someone with mental health problems. I think that tells you all you need to know about Sandifier.
The toxicity of fandom extends even to those who run Doctor Who Magazine and official events.
I recently got into a spat with Benjamin Cook who blocked me. Now in all fairness I am not going to play the victim here. I told Cook to fuck off. Recently Doctor Who Magazine recently hired Claudia Boleyn and many other controversial figures in fandom and openly said that if this upset regular fans, all the better. Claudia Boleyn is a youtuber, singer/songwriter who has been quite vocal about what she feels is the misogyny of the Moffat era. I like Claudia as a person to be fair. She is a very nice, intelligent woman, but I disagree with her political points and by her own admission she was part of the SJW wave of fans. Hiring her, whilst being so vocally against the likes of Bowlestrek and Nerdrotic as what fandom shouldn’t be is making a definite statement.
The magazine however later had to censor and dismiss Claudia Boleyn when she wanted to write an article focusing on the misogyny in the Moffat era. (Showing that even the SJWs have to know their place and bend the knee.)
Naturally when Ben Cook wanted the older fans back, I told him he could fuck off after insulting us, and his response was to send this to me.
Oh mate. DWM is a magazine about Doctor Who, made by people who love Doctor Who, for people who love Doctor Who. And that’s not you. You’re just an angry, women-hating, transphobic turd. If you were the last man alive, DWM wouldn’t want YOU as a reader.
Ha nice try: Now fuck off outta my mentions. I’ve read your tweets. Alt right? You’re not even one of the interesting ones. You’re just… boring.
And half YOUR mentions are people telling you to fuck off. So let me add to the chorus…
Fuck off, you sexist cockwomble.
Now again I didn’t expect a civil response, but I do find it quite funny the way that Cook felt he needed to put me in my place. Who am I? I should be a nobody to Cook, but clearly just as Laurence Miles pointed out in the 00s, the clique are so desperate not to be rumbled, any criticism, even from the plebs and ming mongs they would have looked down on, must be silenced. Also his arguments consists of the usual smearing me as a woman hater, a transphobe, a racist etc, without any proof or even reason to think that I am any of those things.
EDIT update, I later had a much more civil interaction with Claudia Boleyn which really moved me and just further reminded me not to tar all or even most new who, RTD era, SJW fans with the same brush. Whilst there is a problem with toxic fandom, it only represents a minority who sadly have all the power.
Recently when Claudia was suffering from depression. (Something I can obviously relate too.) I sent Claudia a message of support, and she was grateful and sent this lovely message back to me.
Thank you so much for your comment, Burrunjor. It honestly made me smile. Thank you for your kindness and for your compliments. I hope you know that though our views may differ, I really do respect you, and that it means more than I can say that in spite of that you’ve taken the time to wish me well. You mention your own feelings of regret, and I hope you find some peace with those soon. I also hope it’s not wrong of me to feel comforted by you sharing your struggle with a similar issue last year. I think just knowing that you’re here now, and you got through it, has given me a lot of strength.
(Also, I’m a Sasha Dhawan girl now!)
All the best and I wish I could do more to thank you. Xxx
I think this is very important to remember when discussing the toxic side of fandom, as it shows that people with different views can get along very well, which just further highlights how irrational people like Elizabeth Sandifier and those on Gallifrey Base are.
At no point in all the times I’ve been banned, told to kill myself, told to get the fuck out of Doctor Who fandom, smeared as a racist, a Nazi, a homophobe, had people gloat about kicking me off of websites, delete what I’ve written, been subject to racist abuse “KILL YOURSELF WHITE BOY TODAY” “World’s angriest Scot,” has anyone come up with a counter argument to my points about Steven Moffat, Missy and Delgado, or feminist pandering in the revival.
By far and away the most disturbing example of how far some cult like Doctor Who fans are willing to go however, is the recent smearing of Bowlestrek on social media as an animal abuser.
Again I acknowledge a lot of Bowlestrek’s content has become derivative and nasty, (far more so than Claudia Boleyn’s content ever was against Moffat for instance. She always insisted that it wasn’t personal, whilst Bowlestrek recently made nasty comments about Jodie looking like a pig.) That still doesn’t excuse the lengths people on Gallifrey Base and other sites have gone to discredit him however.
Recently a group of Doctor Who fans on twitter created a false rumour that Bowlestrek raped a dog. This was then picked up by users on Gallifrey Base and repeated as a fact on their site and across all of social media. Doctor Who fans even started sending Bowlestrek pictures of dogs, and messages saying “woof.”
These accusations could seriously threaten Bowlestrek’s everyday life, make him unemployable, make him a target of vigilantes. The rumour was completely fabricated, but the posters on twitter and Gallifrey Base hoped the mud would stick. I spoke with several fans who were spreading the rumour, telling them that it was slander. Their response was simply to say that Bowlestrek deservedit because he referred to Jodie Whittaker as Doctor Nasty.
Here one fan named Dimmeh Looming openly admits she knows it isn’t true, yet continues to spread it around because she finds it hilarious (she also continues to tweet Woof at Bowlestrek.)
This was a serious wake up call for me not to get involved with organised fandom anymore. Whilst it’s lame, cowardly, and pathetic to ban people for not accepting your infantile revisionist views of Roger Delgado and Jon Pertwee, or to call people misogynists for not liking Jodie’s “performance”. Trying to smear someone as a sex offender for making shouty youtube videos is frightening and a sign of just how dangerous an organised fandom for something as benign as Doctor Who can become.
The very idea that these people would try and ruin a man’s life like this over a disagreement over a crappy tv show defies belief.
What’s hilarious about the rise of toxic fandom is how they often try and smear their critics of being guilty of what they are actually guilty of. (A common tactic among all bullies.)
A prominent example of this can be seen in Mr Tardis Reviews recent outburst at the NotMyDoctor crowd. Now I have covered Mr Tardis in previous articles. He is a youtube commentator who shills for the BBC (he has admitted working for them in a freelance capacity in the past, and is clearly desperately trying to get a job with them.)
He is also a rampant egotist who sees himself as a knight for women, minorities, and LGBT people in the genre. He happily throws other Doctor Who and sci fi fans under the bus and smears them as sexists, white supremacists etc, just to make himself look better.
The great irony is that he barely knows anything about female or minority characters. Not once on his channel has he ever reviewed an iconic female led genre series, like Xena, Buffy, Charmed, Once Upon A Time, Ghost Whisperer, Sleepy Hollow, I Zombie etc. He doesn’t follow any major actresses from the genre on social media, like Lucy Lawless, Lana Parilla, Maggie Q or Dana Delorenzo (he probably wouldn’t know who half these women were.)
When I called him out on this he ran through a list of female led films he had reviewed. The only problem was they were all films he had to review either as a professional critic or to stay relevant. None of them were films he had tracked down on his own, and even then the list was poor as he was forced to include 50 Shades of Grey among them.
Mr Tardis doesn’t care about female heroes at all. It’s just a way for him to stroke his ego and get in with the BBC, but in spite of this he tries to present himself as an impartial figure in Doctor Who fandom.
In the last few months as the Jodie era’s viewers have crashed, Mr Tardis has naturally taken to blaming the toxic white male fans, but ironically all of the things he accuses the NotMyDoctor crowd of, he and those he associates with are far more guilty of.
See for yourself.
First off I’d just like to say how ironic it is that Mr Tardis is blaming Doctor Who fans for the shows fall in viewers. Don’t you remember when Jodie’s first episode aired to massive viewers, he was gloating about “get woke, get high viewing figures?”
See here.
Yet now it’s all our fault? Hilariously enough Dave Cullen said this exact thing would happen before Jodie’s first series aired that when it declined in viewers, it would be the sexist white males who would get the blame. (I am not the biggest fan of Dave Cullen. I am a socialist, and I support gay marriage, so I clash with him on most major issues. Still credit where credit is due, unlike Mr Tardis he called it out exactly as it was.)
The very idea that Bowlestrek is a white supremacist is laughable. Notice that Mr Tardis never backs his claims up. I do. In this article I include tweets of people accusing Bowlestrek of raping a dog (and admitting that it’s a lie.) I have links to arguments on TV Tropes and Planet Skaro, direct quotes from Gallifrey Base.
Mr Tardis on the other hand can’t find one quote from Bowlestrek that backs up the claim that he is a Nazi.
As for accusing others of spreading fake news, this is a man who saw nothing wrong with people spreading rumours that Bowlestrek was a sex offender, who claimed Jeremy Clarkson was a holocaust denier and who had to retract a completely false statement he made about Sargon of Akkad and apologise for it.
See here.
Again I back up what I say Trilbee. By the way I despise Sargon of Akkad too. I used to like some of his videos I admit, but I now consider him a right wing shill and apologist for Pinochet. Still unlike Trilbee I’ve never had to retract anything negative I’ve written about him, because I actually do my research when criticising him and don’t just jump on a “Sargon bad man” band wagon.
Furthermore Mr Tardis’ videos and articles are often very poorly researched. In his review of Amy, the 2015 Amy Winehouse biography (which is one of the few good female led films he has reviewed, but even then that was only because it was out in the cinema.) Mr Tardis regularly refers to Amy Winehouse’s boyfriend that got her addicted to drugs and inspired Back to Black as Reg Travis.
As anyone who paid even the slightest attention to Amy’s life will know, it was her earlier boyfriend, Blake Fielder Civil that got her hooked on drugs and inspired Back to Black. She only knew Reg Travis for the last two years of her life, and he tried desperately to get her off alcohol.
If he only referred to him as Reg Travis once, it could have just been an honest mistake, but he does so at least 3 times throughout the article.
And all of this is exacerbated by her relationship with her boyfriend Reg Traviss which was incredibly damaging due to his negative influence.
She wrote “Back To Black” when her relationship to Reg Traviss originally broke down and it was one of the most difficult periods of her life. She eventually got back with Reg and overcame many of her struggles.
With this in mind I wonder if he has actually even watched the film, as there is no way anyone could possibly think Reg Travis was the person who got Amy hooked on drugs otherwise.
(He also clearly never paid any attention to Amy back in the 00s when she was around either. Again so much for appreciating prominent female entertainers. I meanwhile was a fan of Amy’s since 2003, just sayin.)
Nerdrotic meanwhile at least was proven right about the Ruth Doctor rumor.
Never mind Nerdrotic’s fake news (that’s actually real) I’d be worried about getting sued by Jeremy Clarkson and Bowlestrek and Reg Travis if they ever see what you wrote about them Shilbee.
It’s hilarious that Mr Tardis would complain about gatekeeping. This from a man who once said “GET THE FUCK OUT OF THIS FANDOM.”
Second I wonder if this bigotry includes “KILL YOURSELF WHITE BOY TODAY.” Or “World’s angriest Scot?” I wonder if this vile behaviour includes smearing people as sex offenders, or telling people who’ve suffered a severe, chronic, life long battle with depression to kill themselves?
Also I think it’s funny how the NotMyDoctor crowd are being accused of being bad fans because they dislike the current version, whilst Mr Tardis never held this attitude towards the feminists and SJWs who smeared Moffat as a sexist during the 2010s?
They devoted an entire website to trashing Moffat called STFU Moffat.com
Yet where was Mr Tardis, who was around at that time’s outrage and declaration that these people deserve unhappiness and that he was glad they were miserable?
Furthermore for all his talk of the NotMyDoctor crowd bullying actors and people involved in the show, Mr Tardis doesn’t seem to care when people are actually fired and even blacklisted from the franchise for expressing the wrong opinion to the other side.
Now tell me Mr Tardis who was it that got two people involved in the franchise (ironically two gay men) fired recently?
That would be the SJW “fans” who got both Gareth Roberts a longtime writer for the series, and James Dreyfus, who plays the first incarnation of the Master in the Big Finish audios, fired and blacklisted for criticising identity politics online.
“Your tears say more than substantial evidence ever could.”
Following these attacks, Dreyfus was dismissed by Big Finish from his role as the Master.
Meanwhile Gareth Roberts was also not just fired, but blacklisted from the entire franchise too. Just to be clear I don’t agree with Roberts, in that I think that trans people do exist. I do believe that gender dysphoria is real, and I have no issue whatsoever with calling a trans woman, a woman. Still to essentially ruin the man’s life by making him never able to work again, especially in a franchise that he helped keep alive during the wilderness period is really low.
Meanwhile Colin Baker who was for a female Doctor, and who wrote a condescending article insulting those who were opposed to it, wasn’t chased off of twitter at all.
And to think Mr Tardis complains because someone he claims to know who worked on series 12 (he conveniently doesn’t say who, or show any evidence) received mean tweets from some NotMyDoctor people. Try having your entire career torpedoed because you disagreed with the other side, or being chased off social media by fans of a franchise you starred in, or told to off yourself when you’re struggling with mental health issues?
Ultimately none of this matters to Mr Tardis or any of the true toxic side of fandom. They literally don’t see Jodie’s critics as people, so it’s okay to smear them in the worst possible ways, taunt them for their mental health problems and ruin their careers.
All of the things Mr Tardis has said are true about the side of fandom he has chosen to ally himself with. They are the ones who will be putting people off. Can you imagine any normal person wanting to be part of Doctor Who fandom today? Why would they want to be part of a forum where if they disagree with received wisdom they’d be labelled a ming mong, a sexist, an animal abuser, and told to go kill themselves?
And by wrong opinion I mean stating an objective fact about the shows long history, like writing that the Roger Delgado intended the Master to be the Doctors brother.
Then there is the fact that actors and writers are in danger of having their entire careers sunk, and their reputations slandered by this warm, inclusive fandom. Honestly what producer, writer or actor would want to work on Doctor Who (an already dying franchise) and run the risk of pissing off such a volatile and bullying fandom (who the BBC and Big Finish will always cater to?)
The only type of person interested in joining that type of fandom is someone who already has the same cult like mentality.
Gallifrey Base gets a new patron (It needs all the support it can get these days not surprisingly since most of its old guard have been either chased off or banned.) Cheers Jon Blum.
Even worse than the toxic fans however are the cowardly fans in the middle. They are arguably the people who have let it get so bad.
There are many fans who understandably want no part in the culture war that Doctor Who fandom has become, which is fair enough. I have no ill will towards fans who wisely just left the shit show the fandom is now like the youtuber, Wingy Media. He is the smart one.
However the people I get annoyed at are the likes of Who Addicts Reviews and Channel Pup, both of whom complain about toxic fandom, but only ever go after people like Bowlestrek.
It’s cowardice plain and simple. I hate saying that as I have had a few interactions with Channel Pup and we got along fine. I don’t think he is a bad person, (not like Sandifier) but the way he only goes after Bowlestrek so vehemently to me always seemed like he was going after an easy target.
I could be wrong, and if he wants to challenge what I’ve written here, I’d be more than happy to hear him out.
Still look at this video.
As you can see he rips into Bowlestrek in the nastiest and most childish ways. Some of his points are valid like Bowlestrek’s nasty comments about an actress from the new Terminator film, but he ends up burying them under petty insults, like ironically telling Bowlestrek he looks like a cinema masterbator.
I have never resorted to personal insults when taking apart Mr Tardis’ or Claudia Boleyn’s arguments. In fact I have always stressed that I quite liked Claudia as a person, it was just her opinions and impact on the franchise that I disagree with.
I may have called Mr Tardis an egotist, and a hypocrite based on what he actually said, but imagine if I said “Mr Tardis looks like the type of person that would feel up girls in parks.” How moronic and just plain nasty would that look? Yet that is actually what Channel Pup did in his attempt to debunk the supposedly toxic side of fandom.
Added to that the video is extremely poorly researched as Bowlestrek later took it apart.
Still that’s not even the main issue. The point is, where was a video like this about the STFU Moffat crowd? They constantly targeted Steven Moffat, they smeared him as a sexist, they got upset over nothing, they made ridiculous accusations that Matt Smith’s Doctor encouraged sexual assault.
Yet it’s Bowlestrek that Channel Pup attacks so strongly? I’ll be honest here, Bowlestrek is irrelevant. He’s just a shouty guy on youtube. He hasn’t influenced the direction of the series by smearing it’s head writer the way the STFU Moffat crowd did, he hasn’t got anyone fired, he hasn’t made forums into places where if you express the wrong opinion, you’ll either be banned, insulted, smeared or all of the above. Even his lowest, most abusive posts have never reached the level of slandering someone as a sexual abuser, or telling them to commit suicide and mocking their mental health struggles.
The simple reason Channel Pup and others go after Bowlestrek is because Bowlestrek is irrelevant and an easy target. You can smear him and face no consequences at all. Try and take on the people who smeared Bowlestrek as a dog rapist and maybe they’ll dream up some nasty little rumour about you. Similarly maybe they’ll get you booted off of social media like Peter Davison, or ruin your chances to work in the industry like James Dreyfus. (If established actors like Dreyfus and Davison can’t cope with the vicious backlash these people are capable of dredging up, what the hell chance does a young and upcoming youtuber have?)
I very much doubt that the likes of Channel Pup would even be willing to go through what I did on Gallifrey Base and have dozens of people dogpile on him, insult him as a misogynist, a racist, a homophobe, and be banned and have them mock him when he couldn’t respond. (I wouldn’t have gone through that if I’d known how bad Gallifrey Base was at first.)
That’s fine if he doesn’t want to go through that, but to try and pin all the blame on the decline of Doctor Who’s fandom on someone like Bowlestrek just because he is an easy target is not only cowardly, but actually helps the creepy, cult like “family” of Doctor fandom. It just further cements their delusion that they are the gatekeepers of Doctor Who fandom who have tried to keep the toxic elements (contrary opinions, people who don’t “bend the knee”) out, but now they are losing.
Who Addicts Reviews meanwhile are even worse as they were actually part of the STFU Moffat bandwagon, yet they now act all high and mighty against the NotMyDoctor Crowd? The same applies to others like Five Who Fans who similarly claim that the likes of Bowlestrek have brought Doctor Who fandom down, whilst also claiming to be impartial. They never say how Bowlestrek did this however, cite examples of forums he’s ruined, actors he’s got fired, examples of the show pandering to him that have ruined it?
In the end if you just want out of Doctor Who fandom like Wingy Media, I could not be more sympathetic, but don’t try and feed the very toxicity that is destroying it by dogpiling on an easy target like Five Who Fans of Who Addicts.
(Edit update, I just saw that Channel Pup and Bowlestrek have buried the hatchet. I respect Channel Pup for being willing to patch things up with someone he was in a feud with, which is exceedingly rare on the internet. Nevertheless I still think that the NotMyDoctor crowd have become all too easy a target for supposedly impartial fans to blame the decline of the show on. I don’t like the NotMyDoctor crowd to be clear. I think they have been guilty of overreacting to the smallest things like the STFU Moffat crowd, such as when they did multiple videos devoted to Jodie wearing a silly costume on set. Still ultimately so far they haven’t had anywhere near the impact the other side have had.)
As you can see Doctor Who fandom is really not even a fandom anymore. It is a cult. A cult that will try and silence any dissenting opinions, and worse ruin the reputations of people it sees as a threat.
Of course not all Doctor Who fans are like this. 90 percent of interactions I’ve had, even with just New Who, Davies, Moffat era fans have been pleasant, it’s just the tiny ten percent that hold all the power that have turned the fandom into a cult.
I’m not saying that we should shun all of New Who. I’m not even saying shun the Jodie Whittaker era, but we need to stop throwing accusations of sexism around at the drop of a hat, stop elevating people like Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat to being above criticism.
No figure in any fandom should ever hold the position that Paul Cornell at least wanted to have. “Reigning or serving.” In contrast to Doctor Who, the Buffy/Angel fandom is one of the best I have ever had the good fortune to be a part of.
Log on the Buffy boards, and then log on Gallifrey Base and the difference is quite alarming. On the Buffy boards you can criticise beloved stories like Spike and Buffy, and not have people dogpile on you. There are some minor fandom in wars like Spuffy vs Bangel, but it’s nothing like what you see on Gallifrey Base.
I lasted a short while on Gallifrey Base as a poster and my entire time there was a truly horrible experience. In contrast I’ve been on the Buffy board for a couple of months now and I’ve loved it. It’s not as though some of my Buffy opinions aren’t controversial. I despise the ever popular Spike/Buffy romance for instance. Yet there is no dogmatic, cult like belief on that site. Even Joss Whedon, the actual creator of the Buffy/Angel series is not held up in the same regard as Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat.
After the Fitzroy crowd are dethroned so to speak, no one else should ever take their place as cult like figures to Doctor Who fandom. That to me is the root cause of the toxicity in the fandom. The identity politics has not helped and needs eliminated as a dominant force too, but ultimately all fandoms are suffering from this right now, but none are as badly hit as Doctor Who.
The combination of its existing cult like loyalty to Moffat and Davies, and the cult of SJWs are truly toxic and needs eliminated from Doctor Who pronto if it is to survive.
What the Family do to Nevile’s flat here is a pretty good representation of what the Fitzroy Crowd and their “followers” have done to Doctor Who and it’s past.
You would have thought that the older Tom Baker would have remembered this, unless Gallifrey is going to come back again! I wouldn’t put it past the Fitzroy Clique to reuse that story arc.
In the previous articles we’ve looked at how the mantras of “all change is good” ,”William Hartnell morphed into Patrick Troughton and that was a change, so this is the same,” “Doctor Who is all about change” destroyed the core identity of Doctor Who as it meant that the Doctor could be anyone, and anything (a recent retcon of the series by Russell T Davies revealed that the Doctor can even regenerate into animals.)
In this article we will be exploring, somewhat paradoxically how the revival has also suffered from becoming too repetitive and how this is linked to its lack of respect for the shows past.
Ironically for a show that tries to justify its ever increasingly disastrous creative decisions with “it’s all about change”, the 21st century version of Doctor Who has become one of the most formulaic and predictable genre series in almost every respect.
It’s companions, story arcs, villains, even its Doctors to some extent are all just slight variants and rehashes of the same characters, themes and stories again and again.
The reason for this is because the writers ironically don’t practice what they preach and are scared to break out of what they think is a winning formula. (It was back in the 00s, but we are now almost 20 years on. That would be like if 80s Who was still being filmed in black and white.)
Added to that their obsession with rewriting Doctor Who’s past with things like the Hybrid Prophecy, the Timeless Children, gender bending regeneration and the Master being in love with the Doctor etc, has become their only way of keeping the show “fresh” and original. Ultimately however the majority of the shows stories are still just the same old drek we’ve seen dozens of times before, except now the Doctor is a girl, or the Master is a girl so that means it must be really fresh and exciting right?
Ultimately the way you keep a show fresh and exciting is by having the character go on new adventures, new types of stories and have them encounter new types of characters and villains.
That was how Classic Who reinvented itself. It changed the types of stories the Doctor went on, from historicals to base under siege, to spy and espionage thrillers, to gothic horror, yet underneath it all, it always kept the Doctor the same character fundamentally.
The same is true for any long running series. Look at Angel, the spin off from Buffy (which I just recently finished rewatching.) It went from a supernatural crime noir series, to a Prisoner style series about Wolfram and Hart trying to break Angel, to a supernatural soap opera, to a series about its lead running an evil law firm.
Throughout it however the character of Angel, though going through natural developments, still always remained Angel, a heroic Vampire with a soul.
The makers of New Who however it seems have it the wrong way round. They think that the core character, who serves as something for the long time viewers to latch onto, should be changed to the point where they are completely unrecognizable, whilst the stories can just keep being the same, boring old ideas from 2007 without any kind of variation. (That would be like in Angel had remained a crime noir series for 5 seasons, but the character of Angel had one season been retconned into being a Werewolf, the next an actual Angel, the next a God, etc.)
Added to that if you keep obsessing about rewriting the characters past, then it means that you will end up constantly keep retelling the same stories. For instance season 9 and 12 of the revival both give us different accounts of the Doctors origins. The classic era meanwhile, most of the time would fill a gap in, like why the Doctor ran away in The War Games, and then leave it at that. The writers would decide to go on and tell new stories, or fill in other gaps about the Doctors life and as a result didn’t spend two whole years on the same question. Fair enough Genesis presents us with a different account of the Daleks origins, but as we have been over, the first Dalek story didn’t really show us the Daleks origins, just gave us a vague second hand account. Furthermore after Genesis no one bothered to explore the Daleks origins again, because what would be the point? We had seen that story now, move on to something else.
Sadly however the Fitzroy Clique have become too focused on the wrong thing, and as a result New Who even without the politics, the fan rage against the destruction of the Doctors character, is just simply a tired and boring show for most viewers in the following ways.
1/ Enemies
“Remember a time when the return of the Daleks was a big deal as they hadn’t been around for a few years?”
The overwhelming majority of New Who seasons have featured either the Daleks, the Cybermen or the Master, or some combination of them as the main villains.
Season 1: The Daleks
Season 2: The Daleks and the Cybermen.
Season 3: The Master
Season 4: The Daleks and Davros
Specials: The Master and Rassilon
Series 5: The Alliance, the two main members of which are the Daleks and the Cybermen.
Series 6: Finally a new villain.
Series 7: The Great Intelligence
Series 8: The Master and the Cybermen
Series 9: There is no main villain per se, but the story arc still revolves around the Daleks and the Master and the Time Lords.
Series 10: The Master and the Cybermen
Series 11: Tzim Sha
Series 12: The Master and the Cybermen.
Out of 12 series, just two feature a new villain, whilst only three don’t feature the Daleks, the Cybermen and the Master or some combination of those three villains. In fact out of the last 5 season finales, only two haven’t featured the Master and the Cybermen teaming up.
Furthermore the monsters themselves I find have often become somewhat formulaic in terms of their role in the series. Before the Daleks, the Cybermen and the Master all represented very different threats to the Doctor.
The Daleks were an evil he could never stamp out. They were an empire who covered the galaxy. Even if the Doctor saved one planet from them, a hundred more would still be under their control at any given time. “We have been delayed not defeated, the Daleks are never defeated.”
The Cybermen were in contrast a desperate, dying race, struggling to survive. They had reached the point of extinction as an organic race, and had prolonged their lives as machine creatures. Now however they were reaching extinction again and seemingly couldn’t prolong their lives any longer. In a way they were more sympathetic as they just wanted to survive. Also in contrast to the Daleks, they didn’t view those they conquered as being inferior creatures. On the contrary they converted them in the hopes of learning from other life forms.
The Day of the Daleks
CONTROLLER: If only you would let me recruit more human security guards, I DALEK: Humans are treacherous and unreliable! CONTROLLER: Not all humans. I have served you faithfully. DALEK: Do not dispute with the Daleks! Obey without question! CONTROLLER: Very well.
The Tomb of the Cybermen
CONTROLLER: We have decided how you will be used. KLIEG: Yes? CONTROLLER: You are a logician. Our race is also logical. You will be the leader of the new race. KLIEG: You will listen to my proposals then? CONTROLLER: Yes, we will listen, but first you will be altered.
See the difference between them?
Both monsters were also used differently in terms of how they were scary. The Daleks lacked a physical presence as they were small, pepper pot shaped, vulnerable, and therefore they would always be scary in large numbers. They would also often be put in a powerful position, or given lackeys who obeyed them like the Ogrons, or if they were few in number, we’d get a chance to see how they manipulate people around them.
The Cybermen meanwhile up close had a tremendous physical presence. If one of the monsters cornered you it was terrifying, as there was no way you could even defend yourself against it. As a result the Cybermen were often used in tight, claustrophobic settings in Classic Who such as in the sewers in The Invasion and the icey tombs of Telos where they could be lurking around any corner and there was no escape.
The Master meanwhile was a different type of enemy in that he had a more personal grudge against the Doctor, was more manipulative and sought to bring about his own universal order.
Now in all fairness to Russell T Davies I think he did do a lot new and interesting things with the Daleks. Even Steven Moffat I feel was able to find a new take on the monsters in some of his stories too. (Ironically I think a lot of the new series writers did a better job with the Daleks and some other villains than the Doctor himself.)
Still the villains overuse and the fact that they constantly have to keep being used in the big, grand finales have gradually caused them all to slowly become the same bland, generic supervillains to the point where by the end of the Chibnall era, there’s hardly any difference between the three of them.
All three have at various points in the revival been turned into villains who are the last of their kind, and are desperately trying to rebuild their fallen empire. (The Daleks in Parting of the Ways, the Master in Last of The Time Lords, The Cybermen in Nightmare in Silver.)
All three have been responsible for the destruction of Gallifrey and the Time Lords at different points. (The Daleks in the 9th Doctors era, the Cybermen and the Master in Chibnalls era.)
The Cybermen’s desire to turn people into members of their own kind was eschewed completely in their latest appearance, where the monsters simply wanted to destroy all life in the universe, much like the Daleks. The Master meanwhile similarly wanted to destroy all life in the universe too. (Which is extremely out of character as the villain is normally a total coward who would never risk his own life.)
At the same time the Daleks have also become too earth centric like the Cybermen too. In the classic era, the Cybermen were interested in the earth more because it was their twin planet. The Daleks meanwhile though invading earth in two stories (The Dalek Invasion of Earth and Day of the Daleks) were often shown to be warring with other species throughout Classic Who.
Their first story sees the monsters battling with the Thals, The Chase features their conflict with the Mechanoids, Daleks Master Plan features their dodgy alliance with other alien races to conquer the Galaxy, Planet of and Death to feature the Daleks fighting with and enslaving other alien races (the Spirodons and the Exxilons) whilst Destiny revolves around their war with The Movellans.
All of this helped the Daleks to feel like a wider threat than the Cybermen, as humanity were just one of many races they had enslaved and warred with. In the revival however, other than the Time War, that is only fleetingly glimpsed, (and a tiny blink and you’ll miss it cameo of the Movellans.) We haven’t seen any other alien species the Daleks have either enslaved, are allied with or are at war with like the Ogrons, the Thals, the Draconians, The Exxilons, the Movellans, the Varga’s, the Aridians, the Delegates of the other galaxies, the Spirodons etc.
Furthermore the revival also doesn’t play to each monsters unique strengths either. Both the Daleks and the Cybermen are usually just depicted in the exact same way, as a massive army sweeping across the land. There’s no attempt to try and play to the Cybermen’s strengths by having them attack the heroes in tight claustrophobic settings, or show a planet under the Daleks rule. The Daleks and the Cybermen will both often just fly through the air, zapping everything in sight and then all get blown up, or swept away at once.
Even the Master gets this treatment too somewhat. His manipulative nature, though played up in The Sound of Drums to some extent, is eventually abandoned so that he too eventually just unleashes a massive army of monsters. Similarly The End of Time and Death in Heaven also both simply see the Master unleash an army like the Daleks and the Cybermen.
Then there is the fact that many of all 3 villains stories take place on modern earth, specifically modern day London too.
In the classic era a grand total of just two Dalek stories took place on modern earth in 26 years. Resurrection and Day (and even then that was only partly in both stories, Evil also takes place albeit very briefly in its first episode.)
In the revival however 6 Dalek episodes have taken place entirely in modern day earth (whilst 4 more, The Parting of The Ways, The Magicians Apprentice, The Day and Time of the Doctor have taken place partly on modern day earth.)
All but four meanwhile (Asylum of the Daleks, Into the Dalek, Bad Wolf and The Witch’s Familiar) have taken place on earth in general. In the classic era, only 5 Dalek stories in total took place largely or entirely on earth (Two 60s era Dalek stories Invasion and Evil, one 70s era Dalek story, Day and two 80s stories took place on earth. Even then Evil of the Daleks only takes place partly on earth. Parts of The Daleks Masterplan and The Chase take place on earth, but as a whole both stories take place largely on alien planets.)
With the Cybermen meanwhile ironically only three stories in 26 years took place on modern earth (and even then Attack only partially takes place on earth,) and only one took place in London. With New Who meanwhile only Nightmare in Silver and their recent season 10 and 12 appearances don’t take place on earth.
All 3 villains have more or less merged together as bland, generic doomsday villains who now have largely the same motivations, the same method of attacking, scaring the viewer (arriving in huge armies), their stories have largely the same locations, they are also often thrown together too. (Every Cyberman story since 2014 has featured the Master, and prior to that 4 Cybermen episodes feature Daleks.)
See what I mean?
This wouldn’t even be as bad if these three villains not only didn’t keep showing up every single year, but they kept being the main villains of every single season too. Do you know that the Classic series once went 5 years without using the Daleks from Troughton to Pertwee? (It also had two more gaps of 4 years each without the pepper pots.) The Cybermen meanwhile were absent for 5 years in Pertwee’s time and later 7 years from Tom Baker to Peter Davison? In fact including these gaps and the 3 years they missed with Hartnell, there are twice as many seasons without Cybermen than with them in the Classic era (can you say the same thing about the revival?)
The Classic era also didn’t feature the Master for the first 7 years either, yet New Who it seems is completely dependent on these classic villains?
Obviously I am not saying don’t use the classic villains at all. The Daleks, Cybermen and the Master when used properly are fantastic villains, but it can’t come across as anything but lazy when all 3 are trotted out almost every single year as the main antagonists.
Rather than focusing on changing the Doctors sex or species, a better way to bring about change to Doctor Who would be in creating new and iconic villains. Other than the Weeping Angels, so far no new series villain has become as iconic as any of the classic series major villains. (The Silence could have, but their arc more or less petered out.)
None have even had the strength to carry a series. It’s not because the new series villains are poor. On the contrary I think a lot of New series villains like say The Beast could easily carry a full series and become just as iconic as classic era villains like say the Sontarans. Ultimately however I think that the writers of the new series either don’t care enough to develop their new antagonists, or are perhaps too scared to try something new ironically when they should in this instance.
Companions
Now for the record I have enjoyed many of the companions in the revival. The likes of Billie Piper, Freema Agyeman, Karen Gillan and John Barrowman were all excellent in their roles, and have all gone on to have fantastic careers on both sides of the Atlantic.
That said however when you look at the companions story arcs, their backgrounds and even just their relationship with the Doctor, you can see that the revival once again falls into a formula.
All of the companions barring a very few, Jack, River and Nardole are from 21st century earth.
The majority of them are attracted to or in love with the Doctor. (Rose, Martha, River, Jack, Amy, Clara.)
Several of the female companions have a wimpy, boyfriend, who becomes the secondary companion of the Doctor, and is jealous of the Doctor, but who eventually proves himself a hero in the end. (Rory, Mickey and Danny.)
Several of the female companions have a more sympathetic father figure and a more aggressive mother figure who hates the Doctor as she sees him as a bad influence. Nevertheless at the end of the series, the Doctor and the mother will reach an understanding. (Rose, Martha, Donna.)
The companions story arc will usually be the following. The Doctor notices there is something odd about her. (The words Bad Wolf keep appearing, he keeps meeting her, there is something on her back, there are cracks in her bedroom, there are multiple versions of her etc.)
In all instances this will be because in the finale the companion will get super powers, be revealed to be the most important person in all of creation and save the entire universe from one of the Doctors archenemies.
Finally the companion will often have to be ripped from the Doctor too. She can’t just leave on her own accord (apart from Martha.) There will have to be some over the top, sci fi explanation for why she can never see him again. (Different universe, can’t travel backwards in time, can’t see her again without her burning up etc.)
However in all cases the writer doesn’t have the guts to actually kill the companion, so she still has to live a happy, wonderful life, it’s just that the Doctor can’t see her anymore. Rose still lives in a mansion with her David Tennant clone, Amy and Rory live a wonderful life together in New York, Donna gets happily married and gets a winning lotto ticket, Clara gains super powers and her own TARDIS.
Not all of the companions follow every single aspect of this template, (though some do like Clara.) All of them however will follow at least a few of these tropes to the point where the companion is now more of a stock character than ever before.
It is true that a few companions in the classic era were dull, uninspired characters who weren’t really developed well such as Dodo.
Still at the very least the classic era for the most part always tried to make the companions backgrounds and relationship with the Doctor different. Take a look at the 4th Doctors era alone.
You have Sarah Jane a journalist from modern day earth who has a strong friendship with the hero, Leela, a savage warrior woman from another world who tends to clash with the Doctor, Romana a Time Lady who is an equal to the Doctor in intelligence and Adric a young boy from another universe who the Doctor develops a strict mentor/student relationship with, Teegan who is a reluctant companion, and finally Nyssa who looks up to the Doctor, but has a much warmer relationship with him than Adric.
Even the 2nd Doctors era gives us a wide variety of companions in terms of backgrounds and relationships with the Doctor. We have Ben and Polly who are merely friends with the Doctor, and who come from modern day England. Then we have Jamie who is from the past, and who becomes more of a willing accomplice to the Doctor, as he has a similar desire for adventure and recklessness. Victoria meanwhile is more vulnerable and younger and has more of a father/daughter relationship with the Doctor, whilst Zoe on the other hand is from the future and talks to the Doctor as an equal due to her scientific background.
The original series ironically despite what the media tells us, often made more of an effort to at least make its companions different, where as the revival is still essentially just reusing the Rose Tyler template after 15 years.
Story arcs
Aside from the companions story arcs more or less being exactly the same, the shows other major story arcs are all very similar and repetitive too.
Series 1, 2, 3 and 4 all feature a monster or villain from the Time War whose main aim is to take over the earth and rebuild his fallen race and empire there. The Dalek Emperor, the Cult of Skaro, The Saxon Master, Davros and the Daleks. The Specials even reuse this idea with Rassilon and the Time Lords.
Also all season finales of the Davies era, apart from Journey’s End feature the villain trying to turn humans into monsters (the Emperors Daleks, the Cybermen, the Master race, whilst the shock twist in Last of the Time Lords is that the Toclafane are humans, much like how the shock twist in The Parting of The Ways is that the Daleks were humans too.)
The Matt Smith era meanwhile relies heavily on the Doctor learning he is about to die. The specials see the Doctor learn about a prophecy that he will die “Your song is ending.” In season 5 the Doctor discovers that his TARDIS will blow up at a specific date in the future. In season 6 sees the Doctor learn that an astronaut is going to shoot him at some a specific date in the future at lake Silencio. Finally season 7 sees the Doctor learn that he will die in a future battle on Trenzalore.
Season 9 and seasons 12 both tease us that the Doctors origins are not what we thought, and reveal the identity of something that is only referred to by a mysterious title. “The Hybrid,” “The Timeless Children.” Both finales then feature the Doctor back on Gallifrey, where the Time Lords are portrayed as monstrous and we discover this mysterious something is the Doctor, and our perception of him has been changed forever.
The Master and the Cybermen have also been featured as the villains, working together in 3 out of the last 5 finales, whilst 5 finales in total feature aliens invading the earth. The Stolen Earth and the season 11 finale meanwhile both feature aliens stealing planets.
Finally in what is perhaps the laziest bit of writing in the entire franchise, series 12 saw the Doctor reduced to the last of his kind again. The first 7 years of the revival saw the Doctor cope with the Time Lords having been wiped out, whilst the 50th saw all of the Doctors team up to save the planet. Killing the Time Lords off again 7 years later not only almost seems comical after everything the Doctor went through to save them, but also smacks of “we honestly don’t know where to take this character, so lets revisit the same story arc from 2005 because it worked back then.”
On top of this the revival also tends to reuse certain episode types as well. To date there have been 9 episodes of the revival set in Victorian London. On top of that there have also been a number of episodes that see the Doctor meet a historical figure who helps the Time Lord battle an alien threat, only for the Doctor to then show them that they will be remembered, or at least lecture the audience about it.
The Unquiet Dead, The Shakespeare Code, The Unicorn and the Wasp, Vincent and the Doctor, Rosa and even the recent Tesla episode all follow the same basic plot. This isn’t always a bad thing mind you as Vincent and the Doctor I feel is one of the strongest episodes of either series, but still when you have so many other aspects of the revival that are similar it does start to look as though the Fitzroy crowd aren’t really trying to think up new stories and ideas.
Conclusion
It’s not always a bad thing if a writer reuses certain ideas. Both Terry Nation and Robert Holmes reused certain themes and concepts. Also it’s not as though Doctor Who hasn’t become formulaic for certain periods in the past, such as the Troughton era that relied too heavily on base under siege stories, or the Pertwee era that became too caught up in invasion earth, spy and espionage stories.
The difference is however that these periods never lasted as long, because new blood would always come in and shake things up. New Who meanwhile has featured the same basic ideas, from last of the time lords, to Daleks, Cybermen, The Master always being the main villains, to companions being the chosen one, from modern day earth, fancying the Doctor for close to 15 years now.
The reason for that is because they are all following the same cult like mantra of “Doctor Who is all about change” but are all focusing on changing the wrong things. They are focusing on changing time honored traditions and pieces of Doctor Who lore to keep it fresh, whilst peddling out the same tired ideas that they still think are current and trendy.
The result is a show that is making no one happy. Fans are furious that the lore is being disrespected with The Timeless Children, whilst casual viewers have not surprisingly adopted an attitude of “seen one Doctor Who, seen them all.” Which for a show about a man who can travel literally anywhere is quite sad.
In the next edition of this series we will be looking at the negative effect the shows toxic fandom have had on the series.
In the previous two entries of this series we debunked the “Doctor Who is all about change, all change is good” arguments and established that there is an identity to the Doctor, and that continuity mattered in Classic Who to some extent (as continuity isn’t just a nerd obsession, but a facet of story telling.)
In this article we will be taking a look at how the 21st century series disregarded as many of the time honoured and defining traits of the Doctor from the start, until they have ultimately completely destroyed the Doctor as a character.
His motivation
In the Classic era the Doctor it was established from the beginning was a rebel among his people. He had stolen a time machine and wanted to live life by his own rules.
When you think about it, the Doctor has the best life imaginable. Far from being a tortured, angsty character like Angel, the Doctor is the ultimate escapist character.
He lives in a magic box that has all the food, comforts and entertainment he could ever possibly need. He doesn’t need to worry about paying the bills, running out of food. It’s all provided for him by his marvellous TARDIS that will never run down.
On top of that he can visit any period of time he wants. He can hang around with all the cool people from history, stir up trouble wherever he likes and never have to answer to anyone.
On top of all of that when he gets too old, he can just renew himself and become younger and stronger again. (Well he can at least 12 times.)
In stark contrast to characters like Buffy and Spider-Man, the Doctor is a character devoid of all everyday worries. We’d all live his life if we could.
The Doctor also is a scientist who wants to explore the universe and discover it’s secrets. He want’s to be the first to set foot on new planets, to discover new species, new cultures.
Even before we knew about the Time Lord’s this was still the character’s main motivation for travelling. In the first Dalek story, the Doctor memorably risks all of his friends lives just to explore a city he knows nothing about.
Later stories similarly show the Doctor risking his, his friends and even in Susan’s case his family’s lives simply to satisfy his curiosity.
DOCTOR: What is it, Chesterton? We really must get back to (From the edge of the petrified jungle they can see across a plain to a city) DOCTOR: Most fascinating. BARBARA: A city, a huge city. (The Doctor puts on a pair of binocular glasses) IAN: Well, Doctor? Can you see anything? Any sign of life? DOCTOR: No, no, no sign of life. No, just buildings. Magnificent buildings, I SUSAN: Oh, let me have a look. It’s fabulous. Here, you have a look. (Barbara takes her turn) IAN: What do you think, Doctor? DOCTOR: I don’t know, I don’t know. Whatever it was destroyed the vegetation here certainly hasn’t damaged the city. But there’s no sign of life. No movement, no light, no. No, I shall know more about it when I’ve been down there. BARBARA: Down there? Oh, no. We’re going back to the ship. DOCTOR: Now, don’t be ridiculous. That city down there is a magnificent subject for study, and I don’t intend to leave here until I’ve thoroughly investigated it. IAN: Well it’s too late to talk about it now. It’s getting dark. We’ll discuss it when we get back to the ship. SUSAN: Yes. Whatever you decide, it’s too late to get down there now. DOCTOR: Yes, yes, yes, all right then. But I assure you I’m determined to study that place. IAN: You can do what you like, as long as you don’t endanger the rest of us. DOCTOR: Very well then. I shall look at it myself, alone. IAN: You’re the only one who can operate the ship. I’m afraid I can’t let you do that, Doctor. Your glasses. (Walking back through the jungle)
DOCTOR: Yes, yes, that explains a lot of things, doesn’t it. A jungle turned to stone, the barren soil and the fact that we’re not feeling well.
IAN: Radiation sickness?
DOCTOR: Yes, I’m afraid so. The atmosphere here is polluted with a very high level of fallout, and we’ve been walking around in it completely unprotected.
IAN: What? But how do you explain the buildings? They’re intact.
DOCTOR: A neutron bomb. Yes. It destroys all human tissue, but leaves the buildings and machinery intact. Yes.
IAN: What? But how much radiation, and how badly?
DOCTOR: We need, we need drugs to be treated.
IAN: But where are we going to find them?
SUSAN: The Tardis will have to take us to another time and place where we can be cured.
IAN: But don’t you remember? We can’t move the ship until we find the mercury for the fluid link!
DOCTOR: For the fluid link, yes. Yes, I’m afraid I cheated a little on that. I was determined to see the city, but everybody wanted to go on and, well, to avoid arguments, in short, there’s nothing wrong with the fluid link.
SUSAN: What? Grandfather, do you mean to say that you risked leaving the ship just to see this place?
IAN: You fool. You old fool!
BARBARA: Oh, I ache all over. I have difficulty in keeping my eyes open. IAN: Yes, I’m about the same. All his fault! Had to have his own way, see the city. BARBARA: Oh, Ian, that doesn’t help.
In Tomb of the Cybermen the Doctor similarly walks into both the Cybermen and Kleegs trap because he was curious.
JAMIE: You know, Doctor, I have a feeling that man’s planned it all. He knew that that control wouldn’t open the hatch. DOCTOR: So did I, Jamie. JAMIE: You knew, Doctor? DOCTOR: I wanted to know what he was up to. KLIEG: And now you know, Doctor.
In The Caves of Androzani meanwhile, the Doctor get’s himself and Peri into trouble simply because he’s curious. It always makes me laugh when New Who fans cite Caves as an example of how selfless the Doctor is, when in actual fact it’s a prime example of his selfishness. The Doctor does go through hell to save Peri, it’s true, but that’s only to make up for dragging her here in the first place.
PERI: So you got a merit badge in tracking when you were a boy scout. I’m suitably impressed. Can we go now? DOCTOR: Er, one moment. Looks as if the tracks lead to those caves over there. PERI: Is this wise, I ask myself? Oh well. (They follow the tracks some way.) DOCTOR: Ah, blow holes. PERI: What? DOCTOR: Now we’re near you can see they’re not caves, they’re blow holes. PERI: Well, same difference. DOCTOR: Not to a speleologist. And not if you’re stuck in one of those things at high tide. PERI: High tide? I thought you said that DOCTOR: It’s a figure of speech. You see, the core of this planet is superheated primeval mud. When its orbit takes it close to Androzani Major, the gravitational pull PERI: Oh, I get the picture. Mud baths for everyone. Well, it’s a change from lava. DOCTOR: Hmm. Presumably why the planet was never colonised. Androzani Major was becoming quite developed the last time I passed this way. PERI: When was that? DOCTOR: I don’t remember. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the future. PERI: You’re a very confusing person to be with, Doctor, you know that?
The Doctor’s desire to simply play by his own rules somewhat paradoxically made him a straight forward character, yet also quite a complex one too.
On the one hand he isn’t a tormented, conflicted character. He enjoys his life, he knows what he wants out of it, he isn’t on a mission to rid the universe of evil etc. He never sets out to be a hero, but because he is deep down a good person, whenever he sees something unjust or wrong, he will feel compelled to stop it.
On the other hand however the very thing that motivates the Doctor to travel in the first place, can also make him somewhat selfish and unlikable too. His willingness to explore means that he is often willing to risk both himself and his friends lives. On the one hand he can be seen as a rebel, who want’s to live life by his own means, on the other he can also be seen as a lazy hedonist, who shirks all responsibility.
His selfishness can even get in the way of wanting to help people. In many stories the Doctor has to be forced into helping people. (Which is quite unusual for a hero in a mainstream series.)
A lot of the time the Doctor just wants to relax and have a nice time, but some higher power like the Time Lords, the White Guardian etc, will have to take control of his TARDIS, or threaten him with torture and even death to force him to do the right thing.
The 1st Doctor
BARBARA: Ian, wait a minute. The Doctor’s miles behind. I don’t know about you, but I felt terrible leaving that old man. We seem to be his last hope. IAN: Yes, I wish there had been something we could have done for him. SUSAN: Oh, come on, Grandfather. DOCTOR: I’m coming, child. Don’t rush, I’m coming. Well, don’t just stand there, come along, come along. Keeping me waiting. (He tries to put the key in the Tardis lock, but something is forming a barrier a couple of inches away from it) DOCTOR: What? BARBARA: What is it? IAN: Well, it’s some sort of invisible barrier. What do you make of it, Doctor? DOCTOR: I don’t know. I don’t know. There’s no substance here. Have a look round the side, child. Go along. BARBARA: It’s like an invisible wall. DOCTOR: Is it a circular barrier? SUSAN: Goes all the way round. Can’t see a cause to it. DOCTOR: No, of course, there wouldn’t be. The molecules would be at their weakest. Ha! It’s fascinating, Chesterton. Yes, I’ve got it, I’ve got it. You know, I think a force barrier has been put up around the ship. ARBITAN [OC]: I am sorry you forced me to keep you from your ship, but your refusal to help me left me no alternative. IAN: Arbitan, where are you? ARBITAN [OC]: That is not important. If you help me find the keys of Marinus, I will let you have access to your machine when you have delivered all the keys to me. If not, you will stay on the island without food or water. The choice is yours. IAN: Choice? What choice?
The 4th Doctor
DOCTOR: Messing about with my Tardis. Dragging us a thousand parsecs off course.
SARAH: Oi, have you gone potty? Who are you shouting at?
DOCTOR: The Time Lords, who else? Now, you see? You see? They haven’t even got the common decency to come out and show their ears.
SARAH: They’re probably afraid of getting them boxed, the way you’re carrying on.
DOCTOR: It’s intolerable. I won’t stand for any more of it.
SARAH: Oh look, why can’t it have just gone wrong again?
DOCTOR: What?
SARAH: The Tardis.
DOCTOR: What? Do you think I don’t know the difference between an internal fault and an external influence? Oh, no, no, no. There’s something going on here, some dirty work they won’t touch with their lily white hands. Well, I won’t do it, do you hear!
GUARDIAN: There are times, Doctor, when the forces within the universe upset the balance to such an extent that it becomes necessary to stop everything. DOCTOR: Stop everything? GUARDIAN: For a brief moment only. DOCTOR: Ah. GUARDIAN: Until the balance is restored. Such a moment is rapidly approaching. These segments must be traced and returned to me before it is too late, before the Universe is plunged into eternal chaos. DOCTOR: Eternal chaos? GUARDIAN: Eternal as you understand the term. DOCTOR: Look, I’m sure there must be plenty of other Time Lords who’d be delighted to GUARDIAN: I have chosen you. DOCTOR: Yes, I was afraid you’d say something like that. Ah! You want me to volunteer, isn’t that it? GUARDIAN: Precisely. DOCTOR: And if I don’t? GUARDIAN: Nothing. DOCTOR: Nothing? You mean nothing will happen to me? GUARDIAN: Nothing at all. Ever.
The Doctor only ever does things on his own terms, from travelling to saving the universe! Ask him to do anything and it becomes a chore. He will happily stop the Daleks if he feels it’s an old problem he needs to take care of like in Remembrance. He will happily save the world if he lands somewhere on his own violation. Send him on a mission however and he will refuse to do it.
This is what ultimately made the character unique. (How many heroes do you think would not want to help if they were told the whole universe was in danger?) The Doctor more stumbles his way into being a hero, unlike say Buffy who is the chosen one, or Xena and Batman who are on a mission to help the helpless.
The Doctor’s anti establishment nature can make him both an admirable figure, who on the one hand never bows to authority, yet on the other it can make him a childish, selfish git.
Sadly however in New Who they completely changed his motivation.
In the Davies era it is established that the Doctor’s people, the Time Lord’s were killed off in a war with the Daleks.
Right away this removed the Doctor’s status as a rebel among his people. Now he was travelling simply because his people were gone, rather than because he wanted too.
The Deadly Assassin (Classic Who story)
(Engin and the Doctor walk past a long case clock and on to the Tardis.) ENGIN: You know, Doctor, if you wanted to stay (on Gallifrey), I’m sure any past difficulties could be overlooked. DOCTOR: But I like it out there, thank you very much.
The End of The World (New Who)
DOCTOR: You think it’ll last forever, people and cars and concrete, but it won’t. One day it’s all gone. Even the sky. My planet’s gone. It’s dead. It burned like the Earth. It’s just rocks and dust before its time. ROSE: What happened? DOCTOR: There was a war and we lost. ROSE: A war with who? What about your people? DOCTOR: I’m a Time Lord. I’m the last of the Time Lords. They’re all gone. I’m the only survivor. I’m left travelling on my own ‘cos there’s no one else.
See what I mean? Right away a big part of what made the Doctor unique is flushed down the toilet.
As a result of being the last of his kind, in the revival the Doctor actually hates his life. He travels simply because there is nowhere for him to go. In contrast to the classic era, he would love to have somewhere to settle down and have children, but sadly there is no one he can do that with now.
See here.
DOCTOR: How did all this get started?
STUART: Outside the Beatbox Club, two in the morning.
SARAH: Street corner. I’d lost my purse, didn’t have money for a taxi.
STUART: I took her home.
DOCTOR: Then what? Asked her for a date?
SARAH: Wrote his number on the back of my hand.
STUART: Never got rid of her since. My dad said.
SARAH: I don’t know what this is all about, and I know we’re not important.
DOCTOR: Who said you’re not important? I’ve travelled to all sorts of places, done things you couldn’t even imagine, but you two. Street corner, two in the morning, getting a taxi home. I’ve never had a life like that. Yes. I’ll try and save you.
DOCTOR: Rose Tyler, Defender of the Earth. You’re dead, officially, back home. So many people died that day and you’ve gone missing. You’re on a list of the dead. Here you are, living a life day after day. The one adventure I can never have.
Now let’s compare that to the Doctor from the Classic era.
My truth is in the stars and yours is here
Steven Moffat would mess around with the Doctor’s motivation to an even greater extent in series 9 of New Who when it was revealed that the Doctor ran away from Gallifrey, because of a prophecy that scared him about a hybrid.
This makes no sense in relation to the rest of Doctor Who. Why did he never do anything about the Hybrid or the prophecy for years? Also why if he was so scared of dying, did he constantly throw himself into the most dangerous situations around the universe?
The worst retcon of the revival to the Doctor’s origins however came in the Chibnall era. Here it was revealed that the Doctor wasn’t actually a Time Lord. The Doctor was an alien from another universe, called the Timeless Child who had the power to constantly regenerate. The Timeless Child was found by a native Gallifreyan called Tecteun after entering our universe. Teceteun then took the Timeless Child back to Gallifrey, where after performing experiments on her (yes her) she was able to splice the power of regeneration onto everyone on Gallifrey, creating the Time Lords.
The Timeless Child would then be brainwashed into being part of a special agency for the Time Lords to fight evil across the universe. Every time the Child would reach it’s 13th life, it’s memories would be wiped and it would be regressed to being a child. Each time however it’s personality would be programmed to become a renegade. The cycle of 12 regenerations from Hartnell to Capaldi, was merely the latest in a line of several billion Doctors. (Rassilon states that Time Lord society is several Billion years old, and so therefore there have been Billions of Doctors.)
This completely robs the Doctor of any agency he had as a character. Ironically where as before he was an individualist character (in both a good and a bad way.) Now he is merely a brainwashed tool of the very establishment he rallied against. At the same time it also makes the Doctor too special in the wrong way.
Before the Doctor was always on the surface, just another Time Lord. He was a bumbling oaf in some ways who made mistakes, stumbled his way into problems, never knew when to quit. Ultimately however what made him special was the fact that he was more adventurous than other Time Lords, had a greater desire for discovery, and over the course of his travels had accumulated knowledge they lacked, and by necessity developed greater improvisational skills.
In short it was because of who he was, not WHAT he was. The same is true of every worthwhile hero. Batman is a hero because of how he chooses to react to his parents murder. Even characters like Buffy, Spider-Man and Superman who are heroes because of their powers, it’s still how they choose to use them. (Compare Buffy for instance to the two other Slayers around her, Kendra and Faith, both of whom are nowhere near as effective despite being as strong because of their personalities.)
Thanks to Chibnall’s ridiculous retcon however, the Doctor is now only special because of what he is, IE a mysterious alien from another universe with unlimited powers, whilst everything about his personality has been created by the Time Lords.
Everything that made the Doctor unique (the fact that he was quite a selfish hedonist, with a heart, or hearts of gold, the fact that he was a reluctant hero, the fact that he was an underdog who managed to be important simply because of his own curiosity etc.) Has been thrown in the bin, simply in order to make the Doctor a more conventional hero (the last of his kind, the chosen one etc.) Whilst ironically all of his agency and development has also been tossed out of the window, as now he was always brainwashed into being a hero by the Time Lords.
His Maturity
The Doctor was one of the few leading characters to be portrayed as an older man. Most action heroes naturally are younger, but even most cerebral heroes like Sherlock Holmes are still reasonably young.
It’s a cliche, but it’s still true that not many people want to see stories about older characters. In this respect Hartnell’s Doctor was quite a stand out, even by today’s standards.
Whilst the Doctor would later be made physically younger, (though not always. Pertwee was actually older in his last season than Hartnell when he started.) The character was still always written as an old man in a young man’s body.
As the Doctors were all meant to be the same person as one another, then naturally Troughton would still have Hartnell’s expeirences and outlook on life even if he was physically made younger. Even Peter Davison who was in his 20s still played the role as an old man in a young mans body.
It’s true that the Doctor could be immature, with both Pertwee and Tom Bakers Doctors stating that they like being childish. Still even then the Doctors immaturity in some cases could also be linked with his great age too.
When we first meet the Doctor in Hartnell’s time, whilst he’s still young for a Time Lord, by our standard he has lived a full life. He has been married, had a family, raised children, seen them go off have lives of their own, even have children on their own. He’s also been through the worst loss a person can live through.
It’s never outright stated, but it is strongly implied throughout the Classic era that the Doctors family died at some point before he left Gallifrey.
It’s the only explanation that makes sense based on the few scant details we know about the Time Lords life.
To start with his granddaughter Susan is in his care. Remember that Susan is just 15 years old in her first story, and is meant to have been travelling with the Doctor for many, many years. With this in mind it doesn’t seem likely that the Doctor would steal a small child away from his own son or daughter, and then never tell them what happened to her.
Furthermore whenever the Doctor goes back to Gallifrey his family are never mentioned. Fair enough he may be on bad terms with them, but still you’d think they would be interested when he is put on trial for, breaking the laws of Gallifrey, killing the President, carrying out a genocide etc. (Even more so if Susan’s parents don’t know what happened to her.) You’d think they’d be called forward as character witnesses at least, but they are never even given so much as a mention.
Finally the only time the Doctor mentions his family directly is in The Tomb of the Cybermen, where the Doctor talks about them in the past sense and relates to Victoria losing her father, which more or less confirms they are dead.
With this in mind it seems obvious that the Doctor always wanted to explore the universe, but like a lot of people, put his crazy dream aside when he fell in love with whoever his wife was, and raised a family.
He had a normal life for years back on Gallifrey that he loved, but sadly in some accident, natural disaster, revolution, or perhaps an alien invasion of Gallifrey, his wife and children were killed, and Susan fell into his care.
Afterwards the Doctor then decided to finally live out his crazy dream, as no one could replace his wife and children and his work in exploring the universe keeps him going. (Added to that many of his companions can also fill the whole left in his life from his children, and later Susan.)
It also explains ironically why he can be so childish, as ultimately the Doctor feels he has already lived a normal life, raised a family, and therefore should be allowed to just do what he wants now.
As a result of this the Doctor was a very mature character when it came to coping with loss, and life’s hardships.
Throughout the entirety of Classic Who, we never see the Doctor let his emotions cloud his better judgement (unless it’s his curiosity) or completely lose his cool.
He isn’t emotionless like Mr Spock. We do see him get angry, shout, get visibly upset, but he never completely loses his cool, and say risks everybody’s lives because of his seething hatred of the Daleks. Whenever he loses someone close to him, he never completely breaks down into floods of tears and loses the will to go on.
Examples of this include his reaction to Katarina, Sara Kingdom and Adric’s deaths as well as Jo Grant and Peri’s apparent deaths. In all instances the Doctor is devastated but keeps a level head. Peter Davison rejects his companions ideas of going back and saving Adric because it will change history, the Third Doctor turns Jo Grants final message that she left him into a weapon against the Dalek, and whilst in Katarina’s case the Doctor remains focused against the Daleks.
Much like his rebellious nature, the Doctors maturity and great age could be both a negative and positive trait.
At certain points it could make the Doctor feel like a safe, comforting presence such as in Tomb of the Cybermen. He was a character who knew all of life’s problems and hardships, and could help his younger companions and even to some extent the younger audience through coping with loss.
On the other hand however, the Doctors level headed, practical nature at times could come off as very cold and distant.
On the flipside of his touching moment with Victoria about her fathers death, is his callous reaction to Lawrence Scarman’s death at his brothers hands in Pyramids of Mars which both shocks and horrifies Sarah Jane.
Sadly once again this defining aspect of the Doctors character was all but jettisoned from the 21st century series.
The New Series Doctor is generally portrayed as an emotionally fragile, and very immature character. In stark contrast to his Classic series predecessor, he almost never keeps his cool, allows his emotions to constantly cloud his judgement and can never cope with loss of any kind.
Examples include, in Dalek when the Doctor goes so insane he plans to gun down a helpless Dalek mutant, and has to be pulled back by Rose. In The Runaway Bride, after losing Rose, the Doctor goes so insane that he carries out a genocide and had it not been for Donna, would have killed himself. (Bare in mind that unlike Adric, or Sara, Rose isn’t even dead. Yes it’s very sad for the Doctor that he can’t see her again, but at least Rose is living a fabulous life in a big mansion somewhere, unlike poor old Adric who was blown to a million pieces. Evidently however the 5th Doctor despite being younger is able to cope a lot better.)
The 11th Doctor is no better as after losing Amy and Rory he has a complete mental breakdown and quits being the Doctor for a long while, whilst the 12th Doctor after losing Clara, willingly undergoes 4 and a half billion years worth of torture and risks destroying the entire universe and shoots an unarmed man, simply because he can’t cope with her death.
In fact the new series makes a point of having the Doctor not being able to cope with death, from River’s “he doesn’t like endings” to 10’s trying to save Astrid when she is clearly beyond saving “I CAN DO ANYTHING” to 12 being lectured by Ashildr on how to accept loss.
This scene is literally the polar opposite to the Doctor comforting Victoria. Why is it that 12, who is thousands of years older than 2 is so much worse at accepting loss?
Overall it seemed to me like Russell T Davies was desperate to rewrite the Doctor into being a younger Peter Parker, Buffy style hero that young boys watching the show could relate to.
Hence the Tenth Doctor engaging in a romance with a young character like Rose, his telling Wilfred Mott that he would be proud if he was his dad etc.
A youtuber by the moniker of Channel Pup recently said that he feels a female Doctor would work as in his mind the character of Buffy was already a female counterpart to the Doctor.
Now Channel Pup is primarily a New Who fan. I’ve enjoyed some of his videos and I have nothing against him personally. (In fact I even invited him to write for my alternate sequel series, but sadly nothing came of it.)
I didn’t like Channel Pup’s attack on Bowlestrek. I feel it was nasty and hypocritical. (Channel Pup complained that the Doctor Who fandom, collectively wasn’t showing enough kindness whilst telling Bowlestrek he looked like a cinema masterbator!)
Still generally speaking I don’t mind Channel Pup, but the fact that he thinks Buffy is in anyway a female counterpart to the Doctor, to me shows how much New Who changed the character.
Buffy is the polar opposite to the Doctor in almost every way. (Not that that makes Buffy a bad character. Buffy is a classic character, and it’s good to have a wide variety of different types of heroes, but she definitely isn’t the same type of character as the Doctor.)
Buffy is young, at the very beginning of her life, deals with everyday problems, like working a terrible 9-5 job, fitting in at school, her mother dying of natural causes etc.
How is that comparable to an ancient alien, who has lived a full life, lives outside of the normal world in a magic box where everything is provided for him, has no real life worries at all?
These two quotes from both characters I think demonstrate the differences between them perfectly. Both involve the characters facing their own mortality (in Buffy’s case she has been told of a Prophecy stating the Master will kill her, whilst the Doctor is walking straight into a death trap.)
Giles: Buffy, if the Master rises…
Buffy: (yanks the cross from her neck) I don’t care! (calms down) I don’t care. Giles, I’m sixteen years old. I don’t wanna die.
TEGAN: Do you feel weird, Doctor?
DOCTOR 1: Full of strange fears and mysterious forebodings?
TEGAN: That’s it.
DOCTOR 1: No, as a matter of fact, I don’t. It’s all illusion, child. We’re close to the domain of Rassilon, whose mind is reaching out to attack us. Just ignore it, as I do.
TEGAN: How? DOCTOR 1: Fear itself is largely an illusion. And at my age, there’s little left to fear. Hmm. No, there’s nothing here to harm us.
Now again that’s not to say that Buffy is a poorer hero than the Doctor. As I said before it’s good to have a wide variety of heroes in fiction, but you see my point that as characters the Doctor and Buffy are polar opposites, yet someone raised on primarily the new series can actually think that Buffy represents the female counterpart to the Doctor? I think that shows exactly what I was saying is true that Davies turned the Doctor into a younger, more immature character all around.
As for Channel Pup’s other point that we have already seen a female counterpart to the Doctor, so a female Doctor could work, that is also bogus. No one ever said that there couldn’t be a female character like the Doctor, (I presonally resent the idea that I need lectured on female heroes by someone who only saw Buffy of all shows for the first time last year. I was watching Buffy before he even knew what Doctor Who was!) The point was always would a female Doctor follow on specifically from her male predecessors, which I’ll examine later in this series.
His Moral Code
Throughout the Classic era, the Doctor always had the same moral code. Whilst some Doctors might be more up front about it, and others more haunted by their actions, at the end of the day the Doctor would always react in basically the same way.
The Doctor prefers non violent solutions to problems. If there was a peaceful alternative he would take it. He will also never kill out of anger, or revenge or when an enemy is unarmed.
That said if he has no other choice, then yes. The Doctor absolutely will kill to protect himself, his friends and the universe at large, and he won’t think two seconds about it. Furthermore the Doctor will kill using any means necessary. Guns, knifes, blunt instruments, explosions, bio weapons, poison, fire, wild animals, the Doctor has used all of these methods to kill his enemies and never shown any reluctance or regret afterwards.
The Doctor is also not discriminate when it comes to the type of creatures he is willing to kill. He has murdered several human villains over the course of the series, such as Professor Solon, members of his own race such as the Master and Morbius (both of whom he was happy to kill) and of course monsters like the Daleks.
The only time the Doctors moral code is ever called into question is if he is dealing with an enemy that is so dangerous, their very existence is a threat to the universe at large. In these special circumstances then he may kill even when his enemy is unarmed, but he will always be shown to wrestle with it.
Examples include the 4th Doctor contemplating, but ultimately being unable to blow the Daleks up in Genesis of the Daleks at their point of birth when they are unarmed and helpess, the 5th Doctor contemplating gunning down Davros when he is helpless and unarmed, and the 7th Doctor blowing Davros up. (With the 7th Doctor being determined not to repeat his previous mistakes, but still being shown to struggle with the decision in the famous cafe scene.)
Once again this helped the Doctor stand out somewhat among other heroes. Most family friendly heroes will never kill their enemies, such as Superman, Spider-Man or even Batman (in most versions.)
Anti heroes meanwhile such as Avon from Blake’s 7, James Bond and Wolverine will often kill as a first resort.
The Doctor however fell somewhere in the middle in that he didn’t like violence, but was practical enough to know that sometimes there was no other way. His violent reactions were never out of anger, or malice. They were measured and because he had no other choice.
Sadly however New Who once again threw this element of the Doctors character away. In the revival, the Doctor has a totally unreasonable hatred of guns, specifically in his 10th and 13th incarnations.
The 10th Doctor refuses to let his companions use guns, even when aliens wielding guns are invading, when a horde of flesh eating cannibals are about to descend on them, or best of all in The Stolen Earth when Davros is about to detonate a bomb that will destroy every universe. The Tenth Doctor actually screams at his clone not to use a gun against Davros, seconds away from the reality bomb destroying everything. He’d rather everyone died than a gun not be fired?
The Tenth Doctors hatred of guns is not only hysterical, and as far away from the level headed, practical Doctor as you can get. It is extremely hypocritical too. He regularly uses weapons that are just as, if not more lethal. (I’m sure the alien you blew to pieces will appreciate the fact that you didn’t just shoot him.)
Ironically there are times when using a gun would be more humane than the method the Doctor uses to kill his enemies. A notorious example of this can be found in the 13th Doctor story Arachnids in the UK, when the Doctor refuses to let a bad Donald Trump parody shoot a giant Spider, (arguing that giant man eating Spiders deserve to be treated with respect.)
Instead the Doctor locks the giant Spiders in a room where they will either starve to death, be forced to eat one another, or be crushed under their own body weight.
What’s worse is that on top of all of this, the New Who Doctor regularly goes too far the other way.
In Human Nature/Family of Blood, the Doctor condemns a race of aliens to an eternity of torture. Now the aliens in question are evil, but still they are nowhere near the most evil creatures the Doctor has ever come into contact with. (Later that very same season, the Doctor goes on to hug a bigger mass murderer the Master, make of that what you will.)
The Doctors treatment of the aliens in Family of Blood is sadistic and totally unnecessary. He could have easily disposed of the aliens, yet he chose to torture them, simply for his own amusement.
All of this not only destroys a vital part of the Doctors character, but also makes the revival era Doctor a difficult character to root for in his, or her own right. Essentially we have a hero who will condemn people for using a gun in self defence, simply because they don’t like guns, yet indulge in a bit of torture when it amuses them.
Sexuality
Throughout the Classic era, the Doctor was almost always depicted as asexual. He never showed any interest in any of his female companions, and all of the actors who played the role, from Jon Pertwee to Sylvester McCoy all said the Doctor was firmly asexual.
It is true however that the series never explicitely stated that the Doctor was asexual, and indeed other members of the Doctors race were shown to sleep with, and even fall in love with humans (The Master, Susan etc.)
Added to that the Doctor did have a grand daughter and his family are mentioned at one point. Nevertheless the character never had any romantic relationships and for good reason.
To start with this helped Doctor Who to always remain focused on the sci fi and adventure aspects of the series. Sadly many other genre series I think end up becoming too obsessed with the lead characters love life, which eventually drags the show down into soap opera territory.
Buffy is a classic example of this during its sixth season, where the horror and fantasy elements were toned down and pushed to the background.
Furthermore as a character the Doctor just isn’t designed for love stories. He is constantly travelling, so there is no way we can have him settle down. He is an alien from the most advanced race in the universe, so advanced that even the most intelligent human would seem like a child to him. On top of that if he were to meet a nice Time Lady that he fell in love with, she would have to be ripped from him if they were really in love. (Either that or she would have to remain with him for the rest of the shows run, which would get stale.)
You could maybe get away with doing that once, but eventually if you keep doing it, then you are going to undermine each love interest as the Doctors one true love.
As to why the Doctor is asexual, I always felt it was more to do with the death of his family. The way I see it, the Doctor doesn’t want that kind of life again. No one can ever replace his wife and children who died, and he now as he said to Victoria, uses his travels to distract himself from their loss.
It’s as simple as that. (Also most of the women the Doctor travels with are not only human, but much younger than he is, and are often more surrogate replacement figures for Susan.)
Again however New Who threw this aspect of the character away. The New Who Doctor is in contrast a very romantic character, and what’s worse is that his love interests are often quite inappropriate for the character.
Rose Tyler is just 3 years older than Susan and younger than Ace, Jo Grant and Vicki, all of whom it would have been incredibly creepy for the Doctor to end up with. Sure David Tennant looks younger than William Hartnell, but remember he is still meant to be William Hartnell underneath his new face.
Added to that the New Who team often attempted to sex the Doctor up, by having him boast about his conquests, slap his companions across the bum, make jokes about “that’s how I pick up girls”, and snog just about every young woman he comes into contact with.
Not surprisingly the romance between the Doctor and his companions often helped to distract from the sci fi and fantasy elements of the new series and meant that they were often not as well developed as in the original series. (Though there other reasons for this, such as the focus on soap opera, shorter length of stories, but still the romance between the Doctor and his companions undoubtedly played a role.)
Regeneration
In the classic era all of the different incarnations of the Doctor were all meant to be the same person fundamentally.
In the classic era regeneration was really nothing more than an advanced form of healing. The Doctors body broke down and then repaired itself, but when it repaired itself, it changed appearance. It basically rebuilt itself from scratch.
The Doctors outer persona was given a shake up as a result, but his consciousness, core personality, memories, morals, motivation all remained the same.
This isn’t just my opinion, all of the most prominent people involved in the original series, Robert Holmes, Terry Nation, John Nathan Turner, Terrance Dicks, all held that opinion as did every actor from Patrick Troughton to Sylvester McCoy.
You only have to look at how the Doctor is written to see it. If all of the Doctors are totally different people, then why would Peter Davison feel guilty for not destroying the Daleks in Genesis of the Daleks and be determined to make amends now?
TEGAN: Where are you going?
DOCTOR: To kill Davros.
TEGAN: Doctor!
DOCTOR: I must. Davros created the Daleks. He must not be allowed to save them.
TEGAN: But murder?
DOCTOR: Once before I held back from destroying the Daleks. It was a mistake I do not intend to repeat. Davros must die.
That wasn’t him? Why feel guilty at something Tom Baker did? Similarly whenever he meets characters that know him through multiple lives, the Brigadier, Davros, the Master etc, he mentions old times with them (for better or for worse.)
Why would Colin Baker say to Davros “last time we met” when it was Peter Davison? Why would Jon Pertwee when he mets the Brig for the first time tell him that it was good to see you again old chap?
The only time the Doctor suffers a huge change in personality is in The Twin Dilemma, but this is meant to be because his regeneration has gone wrong due to the poison. His mind has actually been damaged for once, and the 6th Doctor is genuinely shocked to hear he attacked Peri in a psychotic fit, stating that he would never attack someone unprovoked. How does he know however? If he is a totally different person however, how does he know that’s not just who he is? Clearly he is basing his personality on his 5 predecessors.
With all of this in mind the Doctor was clearly meant to be the same person throughout all of his lives in the original series. None of his development, or relationships with other characters make sense otherwise. Added to that the Doctors being the one character, gives him an identity in popular culture and stops him from just being a title, or a legacy character.
Sadly however in New Who, Russell T Davies did retcon it that the Doctors are all different people after all in The End of Time with the 10th Doctors notorious exit. The 10th Doctor outright states that when he changes he does die and that only the memories go on.
This retcon not only made all of the Doctors development unimportant (who cares what happened to Jon Pertwee, as Tom Baker is a different person) it also undid all of his relationships with other characters too. Now the Brigadiers friendship is with 7 different characters rather than one, as is Davros’ feud with the Doctor.
Also it yet again took away something fairly unique about the Doctor, that he could change, yet still be the same character. Now the Doctor has been reduced to just being like the Slayers in Buffy, or the Trill in Star Trek, or the Van Helsing family, IE a line of heroes, or a title passed down through the ages.
In Conclusion
Clearly the same character.
As you can see the revival really wasn’t interested in carrying on the character of the Doctor from the original series.
Even as far back as Eccelston’s time there were virtually no similarities between the 21st century version of the character and the original.
Everything that made the Doctor unique was jettisoned in the hopes of making him a more conventional hero. Clearly the new series writers either had no interest in, or perhaps disdain for the original core characterisation of the Doctor.
Even the more minor, but still strong characteristics of the Doctor that ran from incarnation to incarnation were abandoned in the revival. For instance physically the Doctor always tended to dress in more Edwardian, Victorian clothes, and his hair tended to be longer and bigger to reflect his bohemian nature. In the revival, Christopher Eccelston’s Doctor had short, almost shaved hair, and wore a modern leather coat. Tennant’s looked was also very contemporary and modern too. Matt Smith meanwhile did reflect the original Doctors appearance more with his tweed jacked, bowtie and long hair. Even then however I feel this was more on the part of Matt than Moffat who originally wanted to dress Matt in more modern clothes.
The Doctor was also depicted as being a highly skilled fighter in Classic Who too. All of the Doctors (save Patrick Troughton) did a fair bit of fighting, but in the revival save for a few times as Capaldi, and one sword fight with Tennant, he almost never does. (In fact ironically Chibnall said a defining feature of the Doctors character was that he never throws punches, completely overlooking the two longests serving incarnations Tom Baker and Jon Pertwee who regularly threw punches!)
Other than the very basic idea of the Doctor being a time traveller, everything about the character from the original was tossed out. (All of this is before we even get to the gender change which will explore in a later section of the series.)
In the next part of this series we will examine how New Who became so obsessed with rewriting its past it became stagnated in the present.
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