The Waman Who Fell to Earth (Part One)

For months now, I've been conflicted as to whether or not I'd even give Doctor Who's eleventh series my time, for reasons I will be going into today, culminating in what I actually think of the series itself, because I'm going to watch the whole damn thing like a masochist. And if I may say, in all honesty I'm impressed at the ratings episode one reached, eight million overnight viewers, not the highest the series has ever seen, but certainly the highest its seen in a while. How much of that was genuine interest or just morbid curiosity is something we found out very soon though as the show lost two million viewers in just the first two weeks. In all honesty though, that's not out of the ordinary for Doctor Who, perhaps a better indication of this series' reception can be found on Rotten Tomatoes, with the disparity between critics and audiences currently sitting at a whopping forty one percent, making it not only the largest disparity of any Doctor Who series since the revival, but also the lowest rated series since the revival at fifty five percent, what a cracking start that was. In this first instalment of our latest story, I'll de discussing why I love Doctor Who, what it is about series eleven that makes me so mad, and the build-up to the airing of the series itself, with a second instalment further down the line when the whole series has aired.

This is Dee, my first remote controlled Dalek that I got from a
motor rally a long time ago. He's old now, he still works but
one of his motors doesn't work properly, so he sits on top
of my bookshelf now, and looks damn fine doing it.

Like my Black Ops 4 rant, I'll be beginning with just where my apprehension and anger towards series eleven came from, it comes from a much younger, much more optimistic me who fell in love with a weird northerner and his magic phone box. The year is 2005, and apart from quintupling in weight and becoming more nihilistic and cynical, I really haven't changed much, I loved toys and video games and my two favourite things in the world were Godzilla and Thunderbirds- and Benji, love you boy. Unbeknown to an oblivious me however, the wheels were turning at everyone's favourite publicly funded national broadcaster, Doctor Who was making a comeback, and it was through my Dad that I was introduced to Daleks' Invasion Earth 2150AD, which was on TV the day before Rose, the first episode in Doctor Who's return to TV, was airing.

I told this story once before when the casting of Whitaker was announced, but it's worth going through here because this was where my love of Doctor Who started; I instantly fell in love with the Daleks, I thought they were so cool, and a day later we all sat down and watched the Doctor and Rose run away from plastic people for half an hour, I was disappointed by the lack of Daleks, but Rose did get me interested, I liked Doctor Who, and I was excited for each new episode. That was until episode six; Dalek, where Doctor Who really became an obsession for me, Daleks weren't just cool anymore, they were frightening, philosophical, sympathetic, and while eight-year-old me couldn't appreciate just what this episode meant, he was turned into the biggest Doctor Who fan in his primary school by it. This period of my young life is something I still hold onto, both sentimentally and literally, I still have most of my old Doctor Who toys; the Tardis playset, the console of which now sits on my computer desk, the RC K-9 shoved under the bed in the spare room, two RC Daleks, as well as a third I bought myself just last Christmas, the Doomsday set that included the Genesis Ark and the Cult of Skaro, I still have it all, I in fact kept buying even into adulthood, now spending my own money on even more Dalek toys and even a canvas poster of the Daleks, because would it be a poster of anything else.

This wasn't a result of my love of Doctor Who being kept alive by the ongoing run however, because this was at the tail end of Steven Moffat's reign as showrunner, which lasted from series' five to ten. Call me crazy, but I never liked Matt Smith as the Doctor, I always felt that he was less able than Tennant or Eccleston to play a Doctor who was both crazy and eccentric but also emotionally vulnerable and cold. The subtle role reversal in Dalek as the titular Dalek becomes more human and the Doctor becomes more Dalek would never have been so effective were Eccleston replaced with Smith because Eccleston was convincingly dangerous and Smith never was because he was too busy eating fishfingers and wearing a fez. But as far as the problems Doctor Who would run into are concerned, an underwhelming and overly eccentric Doctor is just the tip of the iceberg. The biggest issue Doctor Who came down with, at least to me, was that the show gradually degraded in quality over Moffat's run, the episodes got sillier and sillier, the characters became less fun and compelling, and, it being the BBC in the 21st century, gradually lost its subtlety and began preaching. I was never a huge fan of Amy and Rory, who never compared to Rose or Martha or Donna, Clara I liked in some ways but hated in others, and I'd tuned out entirely by Bill Potts. Then there was the Doctor himself, who I didn't like in the Matt Smith days. Peter Capaldi could have been a brilliant Doctor had he been given decent episodes to star in, but instead series eight and nine were a mixed bag to say the least, series eight had some interesting and fun episodes like Mummy on the Orient Express and Flatline, but then it had Kill the Moon and In The Forest of the Night, two royal stinkers. Series Nine was the same, only now every episode was a two-parter, and they all had the same problem of interesting setups and underwhelming payoffs, I remember really enjoying The Magician's Apprentice and being disappointed by The Witch's Familiar, and that was one of about two and a half stories that didn't suck, unlike Sleep No More, Face the Raven, Hell Bent, The Zygon Invasion and Before the Flood, which were all terrible.

To tell the truth, I never even watched series ten, not a single episode. The roller coaster of quality had thrown me off at that point and I'd almost completely lost interest, then I heard Bill Potts was gay, and I was done. Another thing that changed as Doctor Who declined in quality during the Moffat run was I was starting to grow wise to the creeping social justice in media. I'd been oblivious for a long time, but it was in 2014 that I had my first run-in with a progressive, she was my girlfriend at the time, incidentally. It was through her that I was introduced to, or rather, warned of feminism, and through feminism that I stumbled across the likes of Sargon of Akkad on YouTube because I'd decided to dig into this strange new world I'd been warned of by the very person arguing its virtue, she wasn't very smart. Digression aside, as I continued to get a grasp on the sphere of identity politics, I started noticing red flags popping up in film and TV that I was watching, and though I could usually overlook it, there were times where I just couldn't, and Bill Potts was one of those times. Since I was aware of what manner of hiring quotas and discrimination was going on behind the scenes at the BBC, Bill Potts stuck out to me as someone to fill a checkbox, also bear in mind this was after the Master became Missy and a time lord regenerated from a white man to a black woman and then commented on male ego. At this point I'd gotten the picture; Doctor Who's priority was no longer just to be a good show, it had something to say now, something it wasn't going to be subtle about, and something I could not agree with.

What all these things; Missy, the time lord talking about male ego, Bill Potts being the Doctor's first openly gay companion, were the product of was a desire to forward a progressive narrative, to ensure that all the special groups and interests had their boxes ticked. What was also apparent was how Moffat and his writers had been sowing the seeds for a female Doctor, which was never just going to be a simple recast, but a symbolic ideological conquest, the complete domination of a 'male dominated' show, because as we know, to progressives 'white' and 'man' are dirty words. So yes, as everyone knows at this point, when the new Doctor was revealed to be Jodie Whittaker, the reaction was split with a great deal of the split going down political lines; between the progressives who wanted a female Doctor because muh Feminism, and people like me who saw the ideological motives behind it for what they were. Not that dissimilar to Battlefield 5, this got under my skin, and like Battlefield 5, the reasons as to why they did this weren't very well hidden and were soon out there in the world. Chris Chibnall, the show's new showrunner, had made it a requirement for his taking the position that the Doctor be a woman, which only sounds good if you buy into the narrative, considering that cutting the pool of candidates in half, well, cuts the pool of candidates in half, and does so along arbitrary lines that discriminate against people and are informed by the cult mentality of the BBC and their fanaticism for forced representation and diversity.



Question 6 in the interview Whittaker did on the BBC website after the announcement, easily the most telling

 part of the interview in which she states she's a feminist and that it "feels incredible" to not be "boxed in" and be

 told what to do, placing herself as both a victim and an agent of change. Also of note is how the answer is

worded, with her declaring that she's a feminist first and an actor third, whether intentional or unintentional,

a subtle but undeniable indicator of the progressive motivations behind the scenes.

This was apparent from the day Whitaker's casting was announced, in fact in my first post on the subject; Bring on the Meteor VII, I went through an interview Jodie Whittaker did on the BBC website, one in which she unambiguously lets slip the feminist narrative. What followed was exactly what you'd expect; the Doctor Who fanbase, what little sanity there is left in it, went through a schism, while the BBC and progressive media went on the attack by downplaying the backlash and dismissing it as trolls and misogynists, so Ghostbusters 2.0, called it. Meanwhile in reality the video the BBC uploaded revealing the casting, which currently sits at just over a million views, has a worrying ten thousand downvotes to seventeen thousand upvotes, though to its credit, the following trailers did see a more positive like dislike ratio. That's apart from the release date trailer, with an even worse ratio than the reveal trailer at fourteen thousand up to eleven thousand down, and don't worry, that trailer's coming up.

In fact, let's just get to it. The show's main trailers are all fine, Whittaker referring to her companions as her "new best friends," is disconcerting,  as is the hammy accent and Whittaker's even hammier delivery, but I can ignore that, I can even ignore the music choice in the second trailer being really out of place unless you were to go full Alex Jones on it and realise that the song is Glorious by Macklemore, a possible allusion to the self-righteousness of Chibnall and his crew. I can't say I was impressed by these trailers, but I can't say they were complete turnoffs, even with the second trailer repeating the slogan of the release date trailer, which makes me feel sick to read. Where I get pissed off is in that release date trailer, a brief teaser depicting Whittaker literally breaking a glass ceiling before the slogan "it's about time" is shown. This thirty second teaser has less subtly than the entirety of The Emoji Movie, in fact it's quite impressive just how totally they destroyed any illusion that this wasn't political in such a short amount of time. So what really needs to be explained about this, breaking the glass ceiling, this is a blatant allusion to the feminist delusion of the "glass ceiling," the notion that there are institutional barriers in place that keep women out of high paying positions, institutional barriers that haven't existed since when Doctor Who was new, literally. Let's take for instance equal pay, which was enshrined in law in the 70's, while feminists still whine about the so called pay gap of 19%, an average number that intentionally ignores factors like different jobs and hours worked, and also ignores that on average, young women are now out earning young men, something I, as a young working man, and not going to whine about because I don't see it as some slight on my identity, unlike entitled feminists. Like the pay gap, the glass ceiling is a myth, one spawned from a simple truth that in general, men and women prefer to work different jobs, but to consider that it might be the result of individual choices would wreck their collectivist victim narrative.

A photo I took of a local billboard sporting the offending slogan; "It's About Time"

Getting back to the trailer, "it's about time," there's a few innocent ways of interpreting this, such as a reference to the gap between the release of series' ten and eleven, or it could be a crappy pun, given that the show is about a time traveller. But we all know that's not what this really is, the whole "it's about time" thing is an expression of the [current year] progressive mentality. You know what I'm saying, their justification of "it's [current year];" the idea that what they're doing is making up for some kind of historical wrong, or as a justification for something being sanitised or arbitrarily diversified. Example; IGN, the bastion of video game journalism that it is, released their review of Trash Ops 4's Zombies mode, in which they sucked the game's dick for the entire review, but did criticise it for its racial insensitivity. They weren't happy that Takeo, who has always been an archetypal honourable samurai of unbending loyalty to the Emperor, is stereotypical and therefore offensive, and that "in 2018, video games can do better than this." Never mind that that's an entirely moralistic argument, never mind that Takeo has been like that for a decade now and has become so endearing to players precisely because of the wacky comedy that ensues from his uber-honourableness, and Tank's uber-American-ness, and Richtofen's uber-crazy Nazi scientist-ness, they're all wacky stereotypes, and it's part of what makes them great. To IGN in this example, Takeo struggling to pronounce words with the letter L in them is racist and should have been fixed because it's 2018 and because we should all be woke by now, it's about time, in Doctor Who, there having never been a female Doctor is a historic wrong that must be fixed because it's 2018, "it's about time," because history needed to be righted and they're the ones to right it and how wrong they are is irrelevant, because they've determined themselves to be right about everything and for there to be no possible answer besides theirs, because they're a cult.

And this is just from the marketing; like Battlefield 5; there's a saga of behind the scenes drama as the BBC and the usual suspects have been relentlessly defending Whittaker as the Doctor while failing to address and instead accidentally confirming the critics' real concerns, and downplaying and hand waving those critics as best they can. This isn't a surprising tactic, it's something we saw with Ghostbusters, it's something we're seeing with Star Wars and Battlefield, and it's a practice the BCC themselves have engaged in in the past. If people question the narrative, if the see through it and call it out, best to just ignore them, to stick your head in the sand, because that won't validate the critics and endear resentment and distrust towards you at all, they're all just misogynists, all of them, or at least the ones that aren't Russians looking to bring down western democracy by shitting on your flawless and perfect product, because you're not wrong, everyone else is. Once again, this is what we've seen before; Melisa McCarthy calling Ghostbusters' critics basement dwellers, J.J. Abrams saying The Last Jedi haters are just afraid of women, and now the recent comedy routine of the idiots who made The Last Jedi saying that it was the Russians, yeah, that was a real story, Star Wars is dying of the Russians, according to the progressive reality deniers. The BBC and media have been doing the exact same thing with Doctor Who, either ignoring the resentment swelling within the Doctor Who fanbase or belittling it as a minority of sad woman haters, because as we saw with Ghostbusters and Star Wars, that's a winning tactic, that won't result in a catastrophic failure at all. Fast forward to now and Doctor Who's ratings, as I expected them to, started high and then nose-dived, losing two million viewers in the first two weeks, also note the laughably low RT audience score of fifty five percent, only four percent higher than Ghostbusters and ten higher than The Last Jedi. Among the remaining viewers is my mum, who now doesn't let me watch Doctor Who with her because if I have nothing good to say about it, I can shut up and go away. Coincidentally this is the same mindset as the people making the show, who, like my Mum, would rather be ignorant of all the bad things people have to say, because the problem isn't the product, it's the consumer. The Consumer who doesn't have a choice in this one because the BBC is publicly funded, meaning that in addition to paying for the continued existence of a racist, sexist company staffed almost entirely by cultists, the British public also have to pay for their dogshit programming, which is one hell of a safety net; can't compete in a free market? no problem because you're exempt from it, you're payed for through taxes.

If I'm not already, I'll soon be talking myself in circles, there isn't much else that needs to be said here from me. As of writing this we're four episodes into series eleven's ten episode run, and I've seen two of those episodes so far, and I really hope those two aren't the good ones, because if they are, Jesus Christ, this will be painful. So rather than doing what I used to do with TV reviews and reviewing new episodes as they air, I'll be watching the entire series and reviewing it as a whole, but that does mean that A I can't do that until at least December, and B I actually have to watch the entire series, which is just going to be so much fun, I bought a fresh bottle of Whiskey just for the occasion, I'm so excited. So see you in December, or more likely, January, when I finish this story once and for all, until the inevitable twelfth series where things go even more off the rails, because if the last few years have taught me anything, it's that things can always get worse.