Author - Laura Sansom

This is not a feminist piece. It’s a bit like the joke about a surgeon operating on the son but the father is not in the room. Enough comments about this particular pop culture news bite, the press will be filled with relevant modernisation of a female in charge. This is a piece on how an audience dedicated to fifty years of a sci-fi series can’t contemplate a female Doctor as not accepting the iconography of what the genre of sci-fi already has in place, what is alien? In the instance of the Doctor, firstly, he is an alien christened a Time Lord because at the time the Doctor was a man, 13 regenerations later and we have a women. We accept that the alien in this case is semi-immortal and has the ability to turn into someone else and can’t suddenly turn into a multi-legged blob of an alien. However we always expect a humanoid version of an alien and why should it always be a man? It's been on-going that, in the TV world, there have been actors/actresses leave their roles and a decision is made to execute the character from the storyline completely or find a substitute actor to play the role. Obviously there is always a get out clause with Doctor Who and that is the regeneration factor. This plot twist has always been known and yet seemingly readily forgotten. Bond, James bond. 007 has had many differing actors playing the SAME role since its incarnation and we accept that our James has had many different faces. Sometimes he’s even gone from older to younger now isn’t that time travel in itself and now we seem to struggle with an alien transformation with a female chromosome. If we sit outside the generic sci-fi stuff and stay with the Doctor Who franchise then the fanatics will note that there has always been a pattern of late where the lead only plays this particular character for only so long, maybe just two years so Peter Capaldi's time was predictably up. Doctor Who is as English as fish and chips so there has to some understand that any change to the routine. Muddying the waters and changing the recipe was going to gain some interest from the social media platform. Perhaps with a female in charge there’s a worry the show will have a bit more sauce. Shouldn't we give the lass a chance, the only hype deservedly being because she’s the new Doctor undoubtedly in a humanoid form, not that she’s a female Doctor? What might your reaction be to Jodie Whittaker taking on the role of the Doctor? Let us know in the comments section below or send us a Tweet!

Author - Laura Sansom

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