The Twelfth Doctor

A little over a week ago, BBC One made it official: Peter Capaldi has been chosen to portray the title character on its long-running show, "Doctor Who." He is the twelfth actor to pilot the TARDIS, and the first Doctor to start off another half-century of the show. The fiftieth anniversary of the show, which began in 1963, less than a year after I was born, is coming up fast, and some kind of top-secret celebration in televisual form is being planned for November. But I'll write more on that anniversary in the fall.

Peter Capaldi

Peter Capaldi, who will be taking over from Matt Smith, the youngest actor ever to play the Timelord (age 26 when he started in 2009), is the same age (55) as the first and oldest actor to play him, William Hartnell. This has reportedly stirred up a storm of protest among the younger fans who only came to "Doctor Who" this millenium (see the article on the Daily Mail Online) and who think he's too old to play the Doctor. To them I say: rubbish! I have been more than a little dismayed at seeing younger and younger Doctors, and I think Capaldi will be excellent in the role. He's a comic actor, but he can play dramatic parts, and he has more than a little edge and quite a bit of whimsy--a perfect mix for the Doctor. He has just enough of an eldritch appearance to make one think he could possibly be an alien. While the Doctor should not be conventionally handsome, there has been a tendency in the revival to make him more sexually appealing--there has to be a reason all those young people drop everything and run away with him across space and time--and here again Capaldi fills the bill. He has a certain magnetism, a way of commanding the room with his gaze (ethereal and chilling as the angel Islington in the television mini-series version of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere), a facility for comedy and improvisation (as the abrasive and foul-mouthed spin-doctor Malcolm Tucker in the half-scripted, half-improvised series "The Thick of It"), and an ability to show vulnerability (as OCD- suffering Head of News Randall Brown in the second season of "The Hour"). He is the third Scot to take on the role of the Doctor (the other two being Sylvester McCoy (Doctor #7) and David Tennant (Doctor #10) ; it will be interesting to see if they allow him to keep his accent. So far, only Christopher Eccleston (Doctor #9) spoke in anything but the King's English (By far one of my favorite bits of dialogue is when Companion Rose Tyler says to Eccleston's Doctor, "You're an alien? You sound like you're from the North." Doctor, defensively: "Lots of planets have a north!").

TARDIS exterior

TARDIS interior (current)

All right, so what's all the fuss about? Trying to describe the appeal of "Doctor Who" to my friends who aren't fans is almost impossible. Either you buy into the premise or you don't. And what is the premise? All you Whovians out there who are reading this can skip ahead three paragraphs while I explain the show as concisely as I can. The Doctor is a two-hearted, highly intelligent, humaniform alien from Gallifrey, a planet in a distant galaxy, from a species called Timelords, who have learned to navigate through space and time in vehicles they call TARDISes. TARDIS is an acronym for "Time And Relative Dimension In Space" (How come Timelords speak English and use a Roman alphabet? All right, go away! You ask too many questions!); they are bigger on the inside (something about folding space within–stop asking so many questions!); and they have a chameleon circuit that can cause its exterior to blend in with its surroundings. The Doctor's chameleon circuit has been stuck since the sixties, however, so it always remains a police call box (Wait, if he's so smart, why can't he fix it? That's it, leave the room, please!).

Timelords have a clever little trick to outwit mortality: whenever death approaches, as long as their body remains more or less intact, they can regenerate, transforming into a completely new person with an utterly new personality. This allowed William Hartnell, the original Doctor, to leave the show when he got tired of it, but for the show to go on with a completely different actor at the helm. Very handy, that! Originally, it was claimed that Timelords can regenerate up to a maximum of twelve times, allowing for thirteen total incarnations, but they seem to have jettisoned that rule some time ago. A small group of diehards insist that there can only be two more Doctors, but we all know he will go on forever, or at least until the show is cancelled again.

Timelords have a non-intervention policy with regard to events in the universe–they're not allowed to mess with time and causality to change outcomes (sort of the Timelord version of the Prime Directive from "Star Trek"). The Doctor, however, is a renegade Timelord, who stole his TARDIS, and he interferes all the time, dashing about the universe and pretty much saving it a hundred times over (For a hilarious spoof of this, watch Rowan Atkinson in Steven Moffat's "Doctor Who and the Curse of Fatal Death," a comedy sketch written and aired for the Red Nose Day charity telethon in 1999). He has a name, but it's apparently a secret and he only ever introduces himself as The Doctor. He usually travels about with human (he has a soft spot in his hearts for Earth) or alien companions, and for a while with a female Timelord (oh all right, I'll say Timelady, but it sounds stupid), Romana. These Companions are stand-ins for us, the audience: they are the means by which the Doctor explains his actions and relates to us as human beings. The Doctor has a nemesis, supposedly a childhood friend, who only goes by the epithet of The Master, and who is all about destruction and enslavement. There is also a cast of rotating baddies: the Daleks, the Cybermen, the Sontarans, the Autons, etc. Believe me, if you're not a fan, you're not going to care.

Tom Baker as The Doctor

Okay, now we're up to speed. Before we proceed any further, however, let me say for the record that I was not always a Whovian. As a girl, I was a Trekkie, not at all interested in "Doctor Who." In high school my friend Diane was the Whovian par excellence; she even knitted herself one of those 12-foot long scarves that Tom Baker's Doctor (#4) wore. Actually, there was apparently also a 14-foot version used from Season 12 on (for directions on making these and other variants, there is a handy-dandy website dedicated to this, with minute instructions about yarn weight and colors. Really. People do this). No, I started watching in college, when the president one year of our science fiction club, Katherine, was a complete Doctor Who fanatic. She had dreams of being the first female Doctor. My viewing started out casually enough as mockery of the cheesy special effects (you could practically see the wires used to pull the miniatures across tiny fake alien landscapes), the ridiculous electronic music, and the hilarious alien costumes. When bubble wrap was new, they wrapped one of the aliens in this to simulate bumpy skin. I don't remember how it came across at the time, but when I watched this episode recently with my children, we kept gasping with laughter every time the aliens appeared.

But then, gradually, as time wore on, I started to care. I had favorite Companions. I had a favorite Doctor (Peter Davison, #5)! The weird, otherworldly synthesized title theme music could make my pulse race as I gathered with the other faithful in the living room of the dorm to watch (almost no one had a t.v. in her room). We would exchange little catchphrases. We would wield toilet plungers at each other and intone in gravelly monotones: "Exterminate!" Yeah, you kind of had to be there....

Along with the president of our college science fiction club, there are many who feel that the time has come for the Doctor to be something other than a straight British white male.  In his Aug. 6 Rolling Stone article, Peter Holslin addresses this issue directly: "...as far as the story goes, it's hardly a stretch to imagine the Doctor as a woman, person of color or LGBT." In an Aug. 6 New York Times op-ed piece, Jennifer Finney Boylan, a transgender English professor at Colby College, compares the lack of imagination in casting the Doctor to the glass ceilings faced by candidates to the papacy, or to the United States presidency. Yet the progress we've made on those fronts gives her hope that even a show stuck in the '60s, just as the TARDIS is stuck in the shape of a '60s-era police call box, can crash its way through that glass ceiling: "As the producers think about whom they want to take on the role next, they should keep in mind the way people’s hopes are lifted when they see someone breaking the glass ceiling, even when it’s for something as seemingly trivial as a hero on a science-fiction program. Equal opportunity matters—in Doctor Who’s universe as well as our own."

John Barrowman as Captain Jack Harkness

Freema Aygeman as Martha Jones

I would agree with many of the sentiments expressed above, with a few reservations. One, the Doctor has to be British. It's a quintessentially British show. Would you watch if he were American? French?? Really? You would? I think not. Two, the Doctor is a man, just as Romana (Doctor #4's Timelady companion) was a woman throughout all of her regenerations, and River Song (who is human and not a Timelady at all, but it's complicated), remains a woman/girl throughout all of her regenerations. But, three, yes, why not? Why can't the Doctor be black, or Asian, or gay? It would be a refreshing change of pace.

Russell T. Davies

Russell T. Davies, when he was executive producer and lead writer of the show from 2005-2010, made sure to diversify the cast in just such refreshing ways. Davies, who rose to British reknown with his show "Queer as Folk," a fictional recreation of his experiences in the Manchester gay scene, gave us Martha Jones, the Doctor's first African Companion; Donna Noble, the first Companion played by an actress who was older than the actor playing the Doctor; and my son's favorite Companion of all time, the flamboyantly charming and pan-sexual Captain Jack Harkness. Under Davies's tenure, people the Doctor encountered along the way were Indian, African, Asian, Caucasian, and Cat. There were lesbian and gay couples (married ones, even!); there were male and female and alien-of-indeterminate-gender love interests for Captain Jack to flirt with ("Can't I say hello to anyone?"). The Companions all had families, messy private lives, and people who loved them and worried about them.

Steven Moffat

Since Steven Moffat took over as executive producer and lead writer in 2010, there has been a definite narrowing of the social spectrum of "Doctor Who." While some traditionalists have welcomed this as a return to what they see as the Ur-"Doctor Who," I really enjoyed the fresh vision Davies brought to the show, and I miss the diversification of the cast. I especially liked the incorporation of the Companions' families into the storylines, and the sexualization of the Doctor. In his original incarnations, he was sort of neuter: a kindly uncle or older brother figure. Under Davies, the Doctor grew up, and developed a (heavily repressed) sexuality. Now Moffat is trying to shove him back into the closet, metaphorically speaking. Even though the Doctor never acts on his urges, he does seem to express a preference (heterosexual, thus far). I could easily see a gay Doctor being the next step in his evolution. Unfortunately, I'm not sure the viewing public is ready for that, and Steven Moffat is definitely not going to go in that direction.

Idris Elba

Paterson Joseph

So we're left with race. Specifically, it is high time for a black Doctor. Among male African-British actors of the correct age range, there are many possibilities: Idris Elba, Paterson Joseph, Shaun Parkes, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and David Harewood, to name a few. Paterson Joseph apparently lost out to Matt Smith in the last go-round (a mistake, in my opinion), and writer Neil Gaiman claimed on Tumblr that a black actor was offered the part of the Doctor in an earlier incarnation and turned it down (Aug. 7 Telegraph online article), but said he wasn't at liberty to reveal who it was (My guess, based on nothing at all, was that it was Idris Elba, who has become too much of a hot property since appearing on HBO's "The Wire" as Stringer Bell, and now with his own hit show in Britain, "Luther").

Shaun Parkes

Chiwetel Ejiofor

David Harewood

Although Harewood, Parkes, and Joseph have already appeared on "Doctor Who" as guest roles in other episodes, there is definitely precedent for subsequently casting one of them as the Doctor: Colin Baker (Doctor #6) first appeared as a minor role under an earlier Doctor. While these actors are on the younger side (except for Joseph), they all possess both a suitable gravitas and a certain dangerous, mad edge that is required for the persona of the Doctor.

So, while I look forward to seeing what Peter Capaldi does with the role, I hope the producers have the courage to look further afield in the Doctor's thirteenth incarnation, whenever that may take place.

All right, all right, this post has gone on quite long enough. Quite possibly I have wasted far too much time pondering an issue that has slim to no real-world repercussions. Except that I agree with Prof. Boylan, that role models matter, whether it's the Pope, the President, or a madman in a blue box.