How Doctor Who became Doctor Woke

Ever since it returned in 2005, Doctor Who has been the perfect vessel for writers and creatives to promote the political and social causes they believe in under the guise of space-fantasy adventures. In recent years the show has become more strident, with each showrunner seemingly determined to outdo his predecessor on the ‘progressive’ politics front. Steven Moffat notably ramped things up during the Peter Capaldi years; his dismal successor Chris Chibnall turbo-charged the messaging in the Jodie Whitaker era; and the returning Russell T Davies will soon be spicing up things further under Ncuti Gatwa. 

Over the last decade, as identity politics became the type of politics most fed to the masses, the programme found itself perfectly placed to disseminate ideas that formed in academia from the mid-twentieth-century onwards to a wider population.

‘Identity’ rules nowadays, and in Doctor Who the lead character is someone who can change their identity. When this concept was conceived in 1966, with unwell star William Hartnell replaced by Patrick Troughton, the producers had no inkling of the fact that they’d just given the gift that keeps on giving to the identitarians of the future. Years later at the first opportunity Russell T Davies showed that Time Lord society was multi-racial; not long afterwards Steven Moffat had a white male Time Lord regenerate into a black female. The Doctor himself would be next, naturally. (This is not to say this is wrong, just to say that it is.) For purveyors of the blank slate theory, those who claim that people are only different because of social conditioning and not because of genetic inheritance, this is a dream come true. The Marxist academics have their natural successors in the writers of Doctor Who. Here is a show which lets the egalitarians and science-deniers live out their fantasies in broad daylight.

Doctor Who was also ripe for the social justice take-over because of its very flexible format, which means stories can be set at any time in the past, or at any time in the future, or on any kind of alien planet or spaceship. It is a canvas that can be adorned in the most effusive and radical manner; there are few limits. To the activist who wants to change the world it is the most bountiful of gifts (take a Whitaker episode like ‘Rosa’, set in the American Deep South in the civil rights era). And since most creatives lean Leftwards, and since in recent years the West has shifted greatly to the Left, it is of absolutely no surprise that the programme has gone the way it has gone. Sadly, it has morphed into one big finger-wag. Perhaps it was ever thus: back in 1989, UNIT’s Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart was replaced by a black woman. There wasn’t too much said about this at the time, although that may have been due to apathy, as the show was down in the ratings, about to be cancelled (and there was no social media, and identity politics was much less aggressive than now).

We can all agree that the racial segregation portrayed in ‘Rosa’ was A Bad Thing, but the show is unlikely to tackle, say, the treatment of women in Muslim theocracies, or the treatment of the Uyghurs by the Chinese Communist Party, or corruption and brutality in the old Soviet Union. Story selection is key, just like on the BBC News; it reveals biases.

You may or may not approve of what has gone on in the programme. But what is undeniable is that it has. Versed in modern buzz words, the show’s creatives will say they’ve done what they’ve done because they are committed to ‘diversity, inclusivity and equity’. They are doing nothing wrong, they cry, only giving opportunities to those previously denied them, and telling stories which should have been told long ago. So be it. There are problems with their approach, though.

Stephen Armstrong, writing recently in the Telegraph made the stupid error of saying that there was nothing new going on and the show was “born woke” because the Daleks were based on Nazis and two nice, liberal schoolteachers helped defeat them in the second story. As former Who scribe Gareth Roberts pointed out on Twitter, ‘woke’ is the opposite of liberal. And therein lies the whole problem with the makers of Doctor Who and indeed, all those who are willingly swept along by the ideological gusts of these times. They believe they are on the right side of history, or rather they know they are. They equate the likes of critical race theory and gender ideology with the battles for civil rights and gay rights in the past. People like Andrew Doyle have eloquently explained why this reasoning is at fault. 

Doctor Who’s production process has in recent times come to resemble a kind of frenzied auction, with participants constantly upping their highest bids until you can’t imagine they can go any higher (they can). It’s become a game of right-on one-upmanship. Political correctness is bid up into hard wokery. Each time the writers put in a new bid, they feel good about themselves. 

A discussion might possibly have gone something like this: 

“What’s the first thing we can do to annoy the bigots?”

“We’ll make the companion have a black boyfriend.”

“Brilliant. And then, going forward, why don’t we have nearly every companion in an inter-racial relationship?”

“Brilliant. Actually, let’s make the following companion black herself. That’ll show the knuckle-draggers.”

“Absolutely. And let’s have a story in which she goes back to the early 20th century and is abused by white public school boys who she then shuts down because she’s a doctor and is very clever.”

“I still feel we’re not being edgy enough. Why don’t we make another companion not only black, but a lesbian!”

“Brilliant. And – here’s a good one – why don’t we regenerate the Master into a woman?”

“Brilliant. And then when they regenerate after that, turn them into an Asian man!”

“Not an Asian woman?”

“Maybe another time.”

“Okay. The Doctor himself, though…”

“Yep, turn him into a woman.”

“A white woman?”

“Yes… no… well, make her into a black woman a bit later. Temporarily at least. We’ll write it in somehow.”

“Yep, that’s the magic of this show – we can write absolutely bloody anything because we can make up new rules any time we feel like it!”

“And really annoy the fascists!”

“Okay. What next?”

“Let’s have non-white characters in as many roles as we can, including companions. LOADS of gays, including one who says his boyfriend thinks he’s good with his hands. Stick a pregnant man in a story somewhere.”

“Done. And let’s have an Asian companion. Who’s also a nascent lesbian.”

“And we could make the Doctor a lesbian too!”

“Brilliant. But where do we from there?”

“That’s obvious. A black Doctor.”

“Male? Yuck.”

“Gay.”

“Fantastic.”

“With a trans co-star”

“Brilliant. Man or woman?”

“Eh?”

“Do you mean trans man or trans woman?”

“Trans woman.”

“So you mean a man?”

“Yes. NO… bigot! Trans women are women!”

“Okay, sorry. And where can we go from there?”

“Oh I have juicy plans, you’re not going to believe it. The Tory scum will do their nut. Listen up, here’s what we’ll do…”

(And the conversation continues into the dark, dark night.)

Since 2005 all of the above things have happened or are about to happen in the show, in roughly that order – and it had to be that order because each time the audience was being ’softened up’ for further paradigm shifts, just as has happened in the real world: same-sex marriage had to come before the trans stuff, for instance. 

You may think that many of the above script decisions weren’t a problem, and you’d be right. It is the accumulation of them, with a very obvious direction of travel, that is didactic and tiresome. It has got in the way of the storytelling; box-ticking and matters of identity have become more important than matters of gripping drama. The show appears smug and self-satisfied. The determination to over-represent minorities borders on aggressive and almost speaks to a form of insecurity, a kind of mutated guilt.

In another age, Doctor Who showrunners would be doing God’s work. In this secular age, they are doing the work of the god they worship, that of woke, or social justice, or equity, or progressivism, or whatever you want to call it. They are zealots, though they don’t realise it. 

You could make the argument that the show is simply reflecting changes in society. But as the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy pondered: 

TV – is it the reflector or the director?

Does it imitate us or do we imitate it?

I’d argue that the meatier components of Doctor Who’s socio-political agenda are not ones shared by the majority of the population, and the programme directs rather than reflects (the makers would take that as a compliment – they are ‘ahead of the curve’). Perhaps they’ll go too far when the Gatwa series finally arrives. But what is too far? As Jordan Peterson has remarked, we know when the Right has gone too far (discriminating against ethnic groups), but there aren’t the same markers for the Left going too far. Exactly how could they go too far? Of course, those of a conservative mindset think they went too far a while back. But the entertainment business is the Left marking its own homework, so the notion of being ‘unacceptable’ can rarely be reached, because whatever new horizon is reached it is, well, new. And ’new’ to the progressives is always a good thing because it’s the opposite of ‘old’ and ‘conservative’. 

The modern Left is out of control, past wins fuelling its sense of righteousness and destiny. Some on the Left – say, the Spiked team, former trade unionist turned broadcaster Paul Embery, ‘trans critical’ feminists like JK Rowling and Kathleen Stock – realised what was happening a few years back and jumped off the bus. Doctor Who’s creatives, in thrall to organisations like Stonewall and Mermaids, show no such sign of doing so. Just recently, actor James Dreyfuss said that he had been cancelled by the Who team because he did not share their view on trans issues.  

(And just a reminder at this point, because I think we are being sent mad by all this – Doctor Who is essentially a children’s show about fighting monsters!)

There will be those on the Who production team who are not on board with the show’s politics but are too afraid to speak out because they know it will damage their careers and social standing among their peers. This, incidentally, is how totalitarian states operate. 

Russell T Davies put a trans character in his novelisation of his ‘Rose’ TV story in 2018, so it’s clear he is alive to the notion. A trans actor in the show itself will fortify the makers’ belief that they are social justice trailblazers and, in a double-win, they know it will infuriate their ideological ‘enemies’ (enemies that can barely object thanks to big tech censorship).

What is wrong with having a trans companion, many will cry. In a sense, this is not the right question. Better questions might be: why is this happening? How did we get here? Was the audition process fair in that other actors were given a fair crack of the whip? (The answer to that will almost certainly be: of course it wasn’t. The hyper-political Davies knew what he wanted and made sure he got it.) What’s behind it? And I mean, what’s really behind it? Christopher Rufo, in one of his incisive articles for City Journal, goes into some detail about what is at the root of the recent phenomenon of drag queen story hour: “The goal of drag, following the themes of [Judith] Butler and [Gayle] Rubin, is to obliterate stable conceptions of gender through performativity and to rehabilitate the bottom of the sexual hierarchy through the elevation of the marginal.” This is what set the current trans bandwagon in motion, although many of those pushing it don’t realise that – they are useful idiots for the movement.

The danger is this: for every confused young person helpfully assisted in their grapple with their identity by a trans ‘role model’ there could be many others who might go down a path that will do them vastly more harm than good, one of puberty blockers, irreversible surgery, sexual organs that don’t work properly, childlessness, bitterness, hatred, resentment, self-loathing, everything-loathing, lawsuits, suicide. This article by Professor Ramesh Thakur is the best I have read on the multiple dangers of normalising the ideology of trans activists. One day, the promoters of this mayhem – the dreamers, the spoilt children, the properly nasty types – will have moved on to whatever the next most fashionable cause is, their work done. Will they also have left Doctor Who by then?