With the recent news that Peter Capaldi is leaving the show, and rumours that Tilda Swinton is set to be his replacement, the debates have started. Doctor Who shouldn’t be a woman. The Doctor can be black, brown, gay, bisexual, whatever, just not female. Stay with me on this before you start smashing the keyboard angrily.
The essence of Dr Who is that he is an idiot in a box, the idiot in the box, and his female companions are there to make him less of a stupid alien that lacks any social qualities. His female companions ground him and often get him out of sticky situations or reason with him long enough that his Time-Lord brain sparks up a new idea to save the day, and the universe! Now let’s swap that around.
The idiot in the box is a female Doctor Who, she has no clue what is going on in Earth culture and is generally a bit scatty in her actions. Her male companion comes along to save the day reasoning with her, telling her what to do to get out of the situation and calm her crazy mind from making the situation worse. It just wouldn’t work. A wacky female being emotionally controlled by a male companion who drives the story, is not what the world needs right now. In a world where men are being told to grab their women by the pussy, let’s not show another female in need of a man as much as The Doctor needs his female companions.
“But they changed the gender of The Master” – Great but The Master, or Mistress as she now is, is a power hungry character not reliant on any other individual, male or female. Also Missy wasn’t that big of a hit with the fans in comparison to previous incarnations of The Master anyway, so not a great example.
If you want a female Doctor Who, there’s no issue in creating a new character to work alongside The Doctor or in replacement of him for some episodes, but I feel completely eradicating the man wandering the universe, with his female co-pilot, is to take away years of history the show has built up. Would you change James Bond to a female?
Let’s give women something new to create in the Doctor Who universe, they don’t need a mantle defined by years of men.
Edited by Susan Akyeampong