Doctor Who (2015)

That made me laugh out loud!

Aye, and Santa Claus, a well established male character from folklore, should be renamed Mary and have a big bust, long legs and wear a mini skirt.

The Doctor isn't a character from folklore.

He is from the world of TV legends as far as I'm concerned. And that is the modern comparison. The Doctors past is just too geared up as him being male. He has a grandaughter, he married a woman. The Master steals bodies to survive and changing into a woman is more in keeping with what the Master would do. The Doctor being a woman is just a weird obsession Moffat had from Matt Smith declaring he was a girl in The End of Time Part Two. He ( Moffat) was just ridiculously ott with his Timelords can turn into women rhetoric. It was never really mentioned prior to that and Moffat had more campness in his storytelling than any other writer, even Russell T. Davis.

Women can have granddaughters and marry women too.

There is no reason for Doctor Who not to be a woman, but more importantly no reason for Doctor Who to be a woman.

I don't think they should make the Doctor female just for the sake of it. They should hold auditions and cast the best actor for the role, regardless of their gender.

Agreed. The best actor, regardless of gender or race, should get the job. If they're black or a woman, so be it, but don't do it just to tick checkboxes.

Sure, cos that's exactly how the world works.

Why not just do it for the sake of it? What are you so scared of? I'm sure if they did only audition women they'd fine someone. They've always auditioned only men and miraculously managed to find 12 actors deemed suitable enough to take on the role.



You can complain about box ticking but If we didn't have them TV would still be uniformly white & male. Sometimes things have to be enforced for anything to change. It's the only reason you see a maximum of one woman on mock the week.

If using the sonic screwdriver is a satisfactory way to explain how 99% of the Doctor's problems are solved, I'm sure they can explain how he can become a woman satisfactorily.

I quite agree. Bit of a tangent, this, but following Nicky Morgan pulling out of HIGNFY last year, I'm surprised the producers got away with replacing her with a leather handbag, because it left the show with an all-male panel, which is now disallowed at the Beeb. That might well have been the last ever all-male panel show panel we'll see on the BBC.

They've already given us a preemptive explanation, surely?

When that Time Lord General character in "Hell Bent" regenerated from a white man to a black woman, her initial post-regeneration dialogue confirmed that it was the only male incarnation she'd ever had in an otherwise consistently female lifespan.

The idea that a Time Lord/Time Lady can randomly change gender and/or ethnicity as a "one-off" freaky thingy, but in practice it presumably happens rarely and/or to precious few Gallifreyans, is frankly the only in-story conceit that would satisfactorily explain The Doctor who has thus far remained consistently white & male over numerous incarnations ever suddenly becoming anything other than that.

Now that precisely such a conceit has been established as part of the show's lore, any non-white and/or non-male casting (as long it's the best actor for the job, not mere tokenism) is absolutely fine by me.

Presumably Colin Baker was hired because he was "the best actor for the job".