The Thirteenth Doctor is the New Sixth Doctor — Here’s Why
Jodie Whittaker’s entry to Doctor Who was pitched as a bold new direction. The first female Doctor in the show’s history, her casting hinted that the new showrunner, Chris Chibnall, was ready to break with orthodoxy and try something fresh. Unfortunately, Chibnall’s era of the show has shown itself to largely consist of recycled material. His lack of vision and mimicry of earlier storylines results in a static, shallow product.
In particular, many of Chibnall’s choices have directly echoed an era so disliked that the show was canceled a few years after it ended: that of Colin Baker’s Sixth Doctor. Whittaker has become the Sixth Doctor. And Chibnall has shown himself to be very similar to the producer of the show at the time: John Nathan-Turner.
Placing the Classic and New eras alongside one another demonstrates similar development. After reasonably successful early Doctors, the shows found global success — in the Tom Baker (1974–1981) and Matt Smith (2010–2014) eras respectively. Tom Baker went on to become the iconic image of the Doctor in the popular culture. Matt Smith turned the show into a franchise, shooting episodes in the United States for the first time.
These Doctors were succeeded respectively by excellent actors betrayed by wildly uneven writing (Peter Davison and Peter Capaldi). Subsequent ratings slumps, in turn, spurred the showrunners to take a radical shift in approach. Thus: Colin Baker and Jodie Whittaker.
Both Baker and Whittaker play boldly different iterations of the main character. Baker was violent and unpleasant; Whittaker was, well, the first female. Both are blonde and wear sexless rainbow-themed outfits. But the most significant similarities between the two are in how their eras prioritize dense self-referential mythology and a misunderstanding of what the show, at heart, is all about.
Mythology
Let’s start with the mythology problem.
As a show grows older, it begins to include callbacks. Eventually there are whole episodes that you won’t get if you don’t remember that one time in the Pompeii episode in season 4 when that side character was played by Peter Capaldi. It’s an easy temptation to coast off good will from earlier seasons and worldwide recognition without risking new angles. Who needs to reestablish a show’s basics when your show has been a global hit for a decade?
That’s exactly what happened in the 1980s. Following Tom Baker’s wildly popular tenure in the TARDIS, the BBC brought on a new showrunner, John Nathan-Turner. He turned out episodes like Attack of the Cybermen, which was chock full of references to serials from 20 years before — missing serials, to boot. Many of the episodes in his era didn’t seem to really know what show they were in, aping formulas from earlier seasons. And Nathan-Turner assumed the audience was already attached to the Doctor, so he moved the character to the center of the show.
At first, Chibnall tried to make a clean break with earlier seasons, refusing to use old monsters (he swung dramatically back the other way in his second season). But the entire structure of the story assumes the audience is already on his side. Many of the episodes of his tenure, especially those written by him, are thinly cobbled together out of tropes we’ve seen a million times. Because Chibnall assumes the audience is there to watch the Doctor, he makes her the audience stand-in instead of the companions. When the Thirteenth Doctor’s TARDIS appears for the first time, the camera follows Whittaker inside for this new experience — then the companions come along later.
That’s an important distinction, because the discovery that the TARDIS is “bigger on the inside” is magical precisely because it is foreign to the human beings who stumble inside. It is an entire paradigm shift for them — their world is suddenly bigger, their horizon of possibilities widened. It is Lucy entering the wardrobe, not Aslan.
Both Nathan-Turner and Chibnall tried to inject some life into the show after Baker and Whittaker’s weak first years by introducing heavily metatextual seasons which further ensconce the Doctor as the center of the narrative. (To be fair, both seasons were a dramatic improvement. But not exactly what you’d call “good.”) In Classic Who, the Doctor is put on trial by the Timelords and is shown, by the Master, a previously unknown incarnation of himself. And then there was the half-completed Andrew Cartmel-penned storyline which was meant to uncover that the Doctor was involved in the very creation of Gallifrey itself.
Chris Chibnall used a mashup of those storylines to create the Timeless Child twist in the latest season of the show — revealing that the Doctor is the origin of her entire race’s ability to regenerate, with the Master introducing a previously unknown incarnation of the Doctor. The similarity between the two arcs is striking, not least because it is the mark of a creatively exhausted story to become obsessed with origins and nostalgia and backstory over character, allowing its protagonist to navel-gaze endlessly until audiences finally give up in frustration. (Credit where it’s due — this is definitely a trend started by Steven Moffat.)
The focus on the Doctor as the protagonist has the side effect of producing boring stock companions. In 2018, Whittaker’s new companions were a trio, each from a distinct underrepresented demographic in the show’s companion history — black (and disabled), elderly, British Asian. None of the three has developed far beyond that. They sort of suggest character traits, but they’re all external or obvious. Ryan struggles with dyspraxia. Graham misses his dead wife. Yaz … exists.
This, too, is the show’s history repeating itself. Nathan-Turner was interested in catering to certain demographic groups among fans. Thus, the Fifth Doctor’s three new companions were a nerdy fan stand-in, an Australian, and traditional female sidekick just so things didn’t get too radical. Each of the companions failed to evolve beyond those types. And things didn’t get any better with the Sixth Doctor, who had an American and a health nut companion. It wasn’t a problem with diverse casting so much as thinking in types instead of individuals.
Lack of Vision
These decisions illustrate a basic lack of vision.
Both Nathan-Turner and Chibnall approach storytelling not like artists but like producers. Everything they put forth is a surface reading, a magpie patchwork quilt of tropes established by other writers but assembled with no insight or understanding. (It doesn’t help that both showrunners chose to bring in writers with no previous experience on Doctor Who.) Their work is all imitation.(Ironically, Chibnall once appeared on television, at age 16, lambasting Nathan-Turner’s program.)
Take the use of metatextual references. In earlier seasons of the show, metatextual references were woven intelligently into the story’s flow. Tom Baker’s reference to his previous companion, Victoria, comes off to casual viewers like he’s name-dropping meeting the queen of England (as he often did), but to older fans, the callback adds depth to his ruminations about being middle-aged. In the Russell T. Davies years, bringing back Tom Baker era companion Sarah Jane Smith fit perfectly with the second season’s hintings at the Doctor’s disloyalty — if he was such great friends with his current companion, Rose, then who was this woman from his past? But Chibnall brings things back that older fans will get but that don’t really enhance the narrative (Who is this … Captain Jack?)
Even the Doctor’s clothes illustrate this shallowness. Both Nathan-Turner and Chibnall put the Doctor in something that looks more like a costume than an outfit. In the Sixth and Thirteenth Doctor’s cases, these costumes are sexless and neutral, disconnected from any sort of cultural characteristics that can help place the character’s personality.
By contrast, the Third Doctor was a swashbuckling dandy, wearing a selection of velvet smoking jackets, frilly shirts, and usually a cape. The Tenth Doctor was a bouncy technogeek in a dashing trenchcoat and converse tennis shoes, the Twelfth a hip professor in sweats and shades (and also a magician and Victorian gentleman — his character arc could have used some focusing). There were ideas behind these costumes. The Sixth Doctor looks like a circus tent threw up on him. The Thirteenth Doctor’s costume is carefully neutral, suggesting neither masculine nor feminine influences, a sterile and safe set of ugly clothes.
How To Fix It
Poor Colin Baker, who loved the show, was the only Doctor ever to be fired by the BBC. He didn’t even turn up to regenerate, and they had to work with a stand-in in a blonde wig. This despite the fact that he’d become more interesting and complex in his second season (like Whittaker) and the show had tried more off-the-wall things (like the Timeless Child).
I don’t think Whittaker’s in any danger of that — and I hope not! Like Baker, she’s grown into the role. But the only way that Doctor Who can make itself interesting again is to rediscover what the heart of the show really is — to find the telos of Doctor Who.
Here’s a hint: It’s not about ever-more-complex revelations of the Doctor’s origins. It’s about human beings (usually) who stumble through a door into Faerie, guided by a batty old man (or woman) who can never reveal his name.
Writers should pull on literary tropes with understanding — remember the Doctor can be Peter Pan, Merlin, Santa Claus, and a mad scientist all rolled into one. Remember that she’s an ancient character, and not your best pal. “Doctor Who?” is an unanswerable question, so stop dwelling on it.
Hire Doctor Who writers — they get it. One of the things which made the new show so successful in the early 2000s is that it pulled from an established stable of writers who’d written excellent audio dramas during the 1990s. Robert Shearman, Paul Cornell, Toby Whithouse, Neil Gaiman — and new blood like Jamie Mathiesen and Sarah Dollard — they’re all still out there.
The great thing about Doctor Who is that no character is unsalvageable. I’m immensely fond of Colin Baker’s Doctor now. He made a triumphant return to fans’ good graces in the 1990s, when he starred in a series of audio adventures (written by fans-turned-writers) revising his role and reputation. From adventures in post-apocalyptic, Dalek-ruled worlds to rewriting Gilbert and Sullivan on a pirate ship, he turned in classic after classic. But this time, the Sixth Doctor was more like a pompous old retiree traveling the universe with his spunky history teacher companion.
There was an idea there. And that made all the difference.
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