Try, nano-brain, to rise above the reproductive frenzy of your noisy little food chain

[cincinnatus_c]

It strikes me that the Doctor being a woman is something like Bert and Ernie being gay (but not so much like Dumbledore being gay), and also like Bert and Ernie being male, or human. Which is to say, the Doctor being human is something like Bert and Ernie being human. The Sesame Street producers say that Bert and Ernie are not gay because, being puppets, they don't have sexual orientations. Similarly, the Doctor is not a woman because, being a Time L***, the Doctor doesn't have a ... well, wait, how do Time L***s reproduce? (Thank God the word "doctor" is not gendered in English.) But Bert and Ernie are not puppets; Bert and Ernie are characters portrayed by puppets. The reason Bert hates ice cream sodas isn't that if someone spills an ice cream soda on him he has to go in the washing machine; Bert hates ice cream sodas because he likes his soda water plain. Similarly, the Doctor is a human character portrayed ... by the Doctor. The Doctor is somewhere between a drag human and a trans human: the Doctor doesn't consciously choose to perform the human the Doctor performs (but to some unspecified extent does choose unconsciously--quite understandably the current Doctor isn't concerned about why she chose elements of her current body like the last one was, seeing as the casting choice this time around wasn't remarkable like the last one), and the Doctor can't just decide to perform something else, because almost the Doctor's entire body is given over to the performance. (Which, that's a, I say, that's a joke, son; you're supposed to laugh. What exactly it is that makes the Doctor one gender or the other is, you know, a funny sort of case for Butlerian metaphysics. To begin with, do Doctors come with human genitalia or just with gendered haircuts and distinctively pitched voices? I always said, last season, Bill is not the problem; this season, Bill maybe could have been the solution. I don't imagine Bill seeing such an obvious need for the new Doctor to go shopping. Which, nice boots, glad you didn't go very far there, but this is the first new Doctor who would look better in the old Doctor's duds, both in that she would look better in them than she does in her new outfit and in that she would look better in them than he did.) On the other hand the Doctor does not identify the Doctor's self with the performance--the Doctor is firmly Time L***, not human, and all the elements of the Doctor's personality that are products of a particular human embodiment (I can compleen about things!) the Doctor takes to be inessential to the Doctor's personality. (One of my favourite things in Doctor Who is 11's parting speech--I will not forget one line of this--juxtaposed with 12's starting out having forgotten pretty much everything (and I just realized that now that they're up to lucky #13 I can finally keep straight who's what number).) Which is to say that among the vanishingly few things Doctor Who is enduringly essentialistic about is personhood (though given how commonly assumed it is in SF worlds that personalities, not to say souls, are transferable between various forms of storage media, this is not so remarkable, is it).

Now that the Doctor is a woman, it isn't just obviously possible that the Doctor could be non-white but also that the Doctor could be an Ood. See, these things really are slippery slopes ... until you run up against some actual reason. (Although on this particular slide there's nothing to stop you all the way to the bottom, because you apparently have to concede that it's not impossible for the Doctor to be a Dalek. (Then again, the Doctor obviously and absolutely cannot possibly be an American.)) Though an essential part of Doctor Who (compare and contrast real life) is that the reasons are endlessly revisable. At the end of the day, what makes the Doctor a woman is that Time L***s are very clever. (Which is Gallifreyan for "the producers are very pleased with themselves".)

Currently at the back of my shed: 18.9. High today at Peterborough airport: 26.1. For the last time this year it is the last day of summer.

Comments

[cincinnatus_c]

You know what would've been great, though, would've been if they'd done the woman thing like the Scottish thing--12 wasn't the first Scottish Doctor, but he was the first openly Scottish Doctor.

[meanwright]

Openly Scottish time lords?

That's disturbing.

Much more disturbing than a Rowan Atkinson joke that someone took too seriously. That's just like Marriage, Babies, and Lesbianism: how to keep rating up when you're out of ideas.

I wish I could watch Doctor Who, but it feels more like a kids' show now than when it was a kids' show. Back when the Doctor had to be clever. Whereas now, he's Super Bat-Merlin, shooting UFOs out of the sky with his magic screwdriver (but not using guns). It's too rushed, too ephemeral, too trite (look at the Master stories which were really perverted).

Y watched Tennant and Smith for a while. I showed her an old one - Genesis of the Daleks (the last good Dalek story) - and it was much too suspenseful for her.

That really told me what was missing.

[cincinnatus_c]

Modern Doctor Who is wildly inconsistent. Almost the whole last season was crap. Capaldi's first season was also largely crap. There's actually no way I ever would've gotten into it in the first place (I am absolutely an exception to the "your first Doctor is the Doctor for you" rule--my first Doctor was basically Eccleston, and I didn't get into Ecclesdoc the first time and he's still my least favourite of the modern Doctors after going back and watching all of it) if I hadn't happened to be in a place where I could watch the 2014 Christmas special and it hadn't happened to push all my buttons--which led to me watching Capaldi's second season over probably a couple of days, and the last three episodes of that pushed all my buttons again. The one episode I happened to see that I loved before I got into the show was "Silence in the Library", which might as well as anything tell you why I am the kind of Doctor Who fan who fans of classic Doctor Who will tell you is the ruination of Doctor Who. Mostly though I can't go and start watching classic Doctor Who because there's so damn much of it.

[meanwright]

If it's the one I'm thinking of Silence in the Library is one of the better episodes of the new Doctor Whos. Moody, dark, and not stupid. If there were more on that level, I wouldn't have much of a problem with the new show.*

But, I'm not the kind of fan that would ask you for fan badge back. I stopped watching the old series when it got crappy, again.

I think the silence one started off one of the better subplots with what's-her-name (it's a shame I don't rememeber it) -- despite the crappy ending with her being the kid of the two idiots. I probably just like it because I like the whole one person running backward in time deal.** Also the woman playing her was very charismatic.

Again, it was that stuff that kept me coming back to try the new series. But, it would always return to form.

I never saw any Capaldis, for the sad reason that I'd bugged out after the awful Master specials (he used to be so evil; now he's ao pathetic) and it became less convenient to watch. He looked good in the excerpts, and so does the new one. I just can bring myself to give them a shot.

* I don't really mind the new show except that it feels rushed, the plots are often banal (when present) and the Doctor was turned into a superhero. If there were fewer dragons repreaenting and cute fat monsters jumping out of people's bellies and they had had made more of a break with the original show, I'd have kept watching.

** A rather less wholesome version I've tried to start a couple of times in the past 20 years.