Tokenism, Racism, and Unfunny Jokes: How ‘Doctor Who’ Failed Its First Female Doctor

Jodie Whittaker’s tenure as the first woman to play the Doctor in Doctor Who is over. However, before Ncuti Gatwa makes his mark as the series’ first Black man to portray the Doctor, we need to talk about how we completely failed Doctor Who‘s first female Doctor.

Why A Woman Playing The Doctor Was A Big Deal … At First

Boasting almost 60 years on television, Doctor Who is the longest-running science fiction series in history. The cult hit follows the adventures of an alien Time Lord known as ‘The Doctor’ as they travel through time and space with at least one companion.

As a Time Lord, The Doctor can fully regenerate their body to save themselves when they are about to die. It’s a nifty trick that also allows the BBC to keep the show fresh. The character isn’t a dozen different people with the same job, but the same character … who gets a full facelift and body overhaul semi-regularly.

Jodie Whittaker was the 13th official regeneration of the Doctor and the first woman officially cast in the role. Coinciding with the announcement the new showrunner Chris Chibnall, the 2018 announcement was met with a level of excitement worthy of the moment.

Whittaker’s cast of companions were quickly announced, too. They included the Bradley Walsh (host of UK’s The Chase), Black actor Tosin Cole, and the show’s first South Asian companion, Mandip Gill.

On paper, the “fam” — as they were referred to in the show — were the most diverse lead cast in the show’s history. This further stoked anticipation for this new era that promised to leave behind the show’s typically white-British-male-centric focus for new horizons, which is perhaps why the letdown was so unbearable.

How Chibnall And Whittaker Both Fumbled The Ball

Everything from misogyny, bad acting, poor writing, nostalgia bait, and the pandemic has been blamed for Doctor Who‘s recent retreat from favour in popular culture. In reality, the responsibility likely lies in a perfect storm of these factors, combined with the show’s tendency to wax and wane in popularity.

Arguably, however, the Whittaker-Chibnall era was not suffering from external critics — or even the impact of a pandemic — but a complete lack of self-awareness, interest, or even respect by Chibnall or Whittaker for the franchise.

In an interview on fellow Doctor Who actor David Tennant’s podcast, Whittaker confessed she was never a fan of the show and lost interest in watching it when she got the role.

“I watched a bit during my audition process but quickly decided it’s not for me,” she confessed. “Chris [Chibnall] said to me, ‘you’re not playing the Doctor, you’re playing the truth of the scene and the Doctor will come out of that’… so, that’s what I did.”

Whittaker and Chibnall seemed to rely on her casting that they believed, with Chibnall’s authorship, would carry her from scene to scene without really engaging with the actual character — possibly not the best approach for playing a 1000-year-old alien with six decades of TV lore behind them.

Whittaker’s performance as the Doctor was constantly fidgety, rambling and flitting about like a primary school teacher with too much caffeine on board in what constantly felt like a weak impersonation of the character, rather than a genuine interpretation. In combination with Chibnall’s monster-of-the-week approach, the 13th Doctor’s era lacked the depth Whittaker’s historical casting deserved.

The Tokenism and Racism of the 13th Doctor’s Era

Neither Whittaker nor Chibnal engaged with the Doctor’s new gender beyond tokenism that gestured to its significance without ever exploring it. Chibnall even undermined Whittaker’s significance as the first woman incarnation of the Doctor within the show, creating a character arch that revealed the Doctor had actually been a woman before — but the audience hadn’t seen it.

This “hidden” incarnation of the Doctor he introduced was portrayed by Black British actor, Jo Martin. Martin’s iteration of the character was revealed to be from a past the Doctor had forgotten — they were part of a suicide squad that committed terrorist acts on the Doctor’s home planet. While the Doctor has always been a morally ambiguous figure, making the only explicitly criminal version of the character a Black woman invokes harmful stereotypes around Blackness and criminality.

Instead of interrogating what it might be like for a character who lived as a man for thousands of years to suddenly live as a woman, Chibnall and Whittaker opted for a joshing yet humourless laissez-faire approach. Whittaker’s Doctor refers to herself as “daddy,” and would follow friends into men’s only spaces. But these moments were played off as poor jokes and limited to early episodes. Only one episode, ‘The Witchfinders’, forced her to grapple with misogyny after being accused of witchcraft in the 1700s.

This ‘very special episode purposed to acknowledge cultural and social differences for one time only’ was also haphazardly applied to the new companions. In ‘Rosa,’ an episode where the Doctor and her friends travel back in time to meet Rosa Parks, the Doctor’s Black companion Ryan experiences mid-century US segregation.

Ryan does experience the occasional microaggression beyond this episode, most notably in ‘The Witchfinders’ where strangers repeatedly refer to him as “exotic.” However, these mostly occur in episodes set in the past. Relegating racism to something Ryan would experience almost exclusively in the past is reductive and ultimately suggests we now inhabit a post-race utopia.

To compound the tokenism and racism, Ryan’s grandmother, Grace, was this era’s only other significant Black woman character; and she was fridged in the 2018 series premiere. Grace’s death existed purely to save the Doctor, and push Ryan and his grandfather-in-law, Graham (Bradley Walsh) into travelling with the Doctor to avoid their grief.

As for Ryan’s characterisation, he was frequently written as an incompetent character who constantly needed to defer to the white and non-Black characters around him. Even when they travel back in time to meet Rosa Parks, Ryan needs to be told by the Doctor, Graham and Yaz who Rosa Parks is. Rarely allowed agency, Ryan was almost always paired off with Graham, his white Grandfather-in-law, who is constantly positioned as Ryan’s guide.

Doctor Who has a long history of shoehorning Black men into the simple-minded roles harking back to the ‘Uncle Tom’ caricature. Like Mickey Smith (Noel Clarke) from the show’s first modern season in 2005, Ryan essentially exists as a well-meaning but uninformed tagalong whose purpose is mostly to prompt exposition from supposedly smarter white and non-Black characters.

The same is true for space pilot, Vinder (Jacob Anderson). As with Ryan, Vinder exists to fail at almost every task (except ones that serve white characters) so that other, predominantly white characters, can rescue him and prove how smart they are. Despite being billed as a competent pilot, Vinder’s entire character arc saw him wander around the universe in confusion until, of course, the Doctor saves him.

As for the series’ first South Asian, specifically Pakistani, companion Yasmin Kahn — a meaningful representation of her ethnicity was also reduced to a single episode. In ‘Demons Of The Punjab,’ Yaz travels to Partition-era India to see her grandmother. Much like Ryan, however, Yaz’s culture has zero bearing on her character past beyond this one episode.

Subsequently, Yaz’s queerness and crush on the Doctor were also underdeveloped. Any meaningful consideration of how Yaz — a queer, second-generation Muslim — would navigate having gay feelings (for an alien) never made it to screen.

Hell, it took until the last 30 minutes of Whittaker’s penultimate episode for this ‘romance’ to stumble its way into the main plot. Compared to the Doctor’s past romances when they presented as a man that preoccupied plots of entire seasons, it was quite something to see the Doctor’s first on-screen queer relationship with a woman reduced, like most of these characters’ cultural characterisation, to a footnote.

Despite a diverse cast, the 13th Doctor’s era is riddled with an almost total lack of cultural sensitivity. The Doctor’s greatest frenemy, also a Time Lord known as the Master, appeared in Whittaker’s second season played to near perfection by British-Indian actor Sacha Dhawan.

In a nauseating moment bafflingly framed as heroic, Whittaker’s Doctor tricks the Master into the hands of the Nazis to one-up him — utilising her privilege as a white person to sentence a man of colour to history’s most notorious white supremacist regime.

If Whittaker’s Doctor was a feminist figure, she is one whose empowerment, time and time and time again, was built on the tokenism, infantilisation, and dehumanisation of characters of colour. White feminism — feminism that exclusively centres and benefits white women — is not worth celebrating, no matter how significant the role of the woman might be. It’s also not feminism.

There are undoubtedly bigoted fans who blame the existence of this diversity for the show’s dip in quality. But that’s putting the horse before the cart. Diverse stories may be greeted by bigoted feedback, but their quality is entirely dependent on the cultural competency of the storytellers, and the respect they have for the story they’re telling — neither of which the 13th Doctor’s era ever displayed.

Sadly, the greatest legacy of the Chibnall-Whittaker era is the surface-level significance of its casting. But perhaps if they had taken what and who they represented a little more seriously, it might not have been such a shallow, and at times even harmful, disappointment.

Doctor Who will return in 2023 on Disney+.