Are you saying people can be actors of standing with real careers outside America? In spite of America, In fact?
I know, shocking isn't it
Peter Capaldi continues to show how awesome he is
- Thread starter The Nth Doctor
- Start date
I know, shocking isn't it
OK, another thing. The Doctor is looking after humanity, and after his companions, and after us – the audience.That what's makes him special, and what makes you separate "the Doctor" from "a Time Lord".
But let's say somebody... maybe a Time Lady... is out there to look after the Doctor in the way he looks after humanity? The Doctor's Doctor. And has done no less than the TARDIS (also depicted as a woman) to look after him and help him look after humanity, in a way no different than he does.
And the Time Lady is called Missy, of course...
Not to mention that she would be the third woman to do so in recent Who – Clara also did basically helped the Doctor at every turn just like that – too bad that her portrayal has waned after the Asylum. And that's if you don't include the female companions who often did more as sidekicks than the Doctor himself.
Sure, not the same thing as being the Doctor, and yes, it's still just another secondary role, and yes, it still doesn't help those girls and women who love the Doctor and like to see themselves as the Doctor, but it would be still does a thing about representation. We'll see if that would happen.
I still prefer a female Doctor. For quite selfish reasons though – I think it would be awesome. A long overdue form of awesome.
Tennant wasn't an unkknown actor before Cotor Who unlike Matt Smith he as even in a movie with Eccleston and like the other Doctor Who actors he's really not left the part he still numerious Doctor Who intereviews. The Fright Night remake was a bomb at the box office but that's got notingto do with typecasting, I don't know where you got that idea. And Carey Mulligan has done quite well for herself after her one shot on Doctor Who so has Karen Gillan and niether of their successes were due to Doctor Who.
I think "keeping the show British" was not the best phrase for me to use in expressing my mixed feelings on maintaining vs. changing certain elements of Doctor Who, and questioning whether certain elements are "intrinsic", crucial aspects of Doctor Who (for both the character and the program, in general).
We are all very clearly in the middle of a debate over the degree of importance of the Doctor's gender identity. I had stated earlier that, while I have always viewed of the Doctor as being a male entity, I can not deny the reasoning (using both "In Universe" and "Real World" arguments) put forth to justify having an eventual female incarnation(s!). Despite my personal preference for keeping the Doctor a male character, I can not justify it, given the 'facts'. I may be warming to the idea.
What I had initially intended to offer was an acknowledgement that, in reality, there may be no good reason for maintaining other aspects of "Doctor Who", either. What are the REALLY intrinsic, critical, unchangeable core aspects of the show. And which ones actually are not?
I tried to state earlier that I really LIKE that the Doctor and the show is British. While it was pointed out to me that the Doctor is "not actually British"........ I think we all know he "IS"! He eats Jammie Dodgers and Jelly Babies (not Twinkies nor M&Ms), wears trainers (perhaps 'sand shoes'..... but not sneakers!), plays cricket (not baseball)..... travels in what looks like a British Police Box, and is always hangin' about in England. And listen to those Gallifreyan accents! (And yes, I know "Plenty of planets have a North"). And I do LIKE this!
But just because things have 'been British' so far, does not mean that they need to stay that way. As I had said, how about a vatrushka-loving female Doctor with a Russian accent who is quite often returning to Earth to defend Moscow from aliens? Or how about Scott Bakula starting his tenure as the Doctor by swooping in over the French Quarter of New Orleans, hanging from the door of his crashing TARDIS, to later greet invading aliens with a hearty "Where y'at?" in his Cajun accent as he offers them a muffaletta?
I would prefer not to see that. I don't wish to see an "American" Doctor. Or to see a Doctor owned by (and with adventures produced by) Disney Studios. But I can not come up with a defensible reason for why that someday should not (and will not) happen. It doesn't mean I don't like America or Disney or American actors. For me, something would be lost. But maybe what is 'lost' is not intrinsically important to the story telling, as long as the story telling is done well.
And then there is *sigh* the TARDIS: my favorite vehicle in all of the Space-Time Continuum (I hope the Enterprise is not monitoring this thread....!). We know that the outer shell of a Type 40 TT capsule is infinitely changeable, and the Doctor does have the ability to repair the Chameleon Circuit. So why should the TARDIS stay a Police Box just because it has been that way for most all of its journeys with the Doctor? Maybe it should get stuck in some other humorously 'inappropriate' form for the Doctor's next cycle of 12 regenerations. Or would Doctor Who stop being Doctor Who if the TARDIS worked properly and started to blend in when it landed? Some people would argue that it would not matter....
(I have participated in threads here in which some members stated that the TARDIS is just a means of getting from one place to another. "Open the doors and get out and get on with the story!" And who cares if it is sentient, or was grown from 'TARDIS coral', or has interesting interiors that we haven't yet seen, including a garage where Betsy is stored..... )
I like that the TARDIS tends to be a Police Box.
I like that the Doctor 'is British'. Well... actually, I guess he's "Gone Scottish" now....
And I like him as an iconic male character.
Yet I can understand why others would like to see a female incarnation. And I would not wish to be someone standing in the way. But I also can see that there is really no reason why 15 years from now we can't have a French Doctor with a fully functional TARDIS that s/he tends to leave in a parking garage disguised as a VW van. But I do hope that we don't go there.
So Ladies--- when doing your future routine maintenance on the TARDIS, please do NOT fix that Chameleon Circuit!
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^Scottish is British. At least, subject to what happens in the independence referendum in a few weeks.
^ I do understand that. Just throwing in that perhaps-slightly-inaccuate comment as a reference to that referendum, and the intensity of Twelve's feelings about 'being Scottish'.
Well technically even if Scotland becomes independant they'll still be part of the British Isles (unless they're planning to detatch themselves physically) plus ecven if there's a yes vote a substantial number of Scots will probably still consider themselves British.
How can you know they won't? There have been reports of space whale sightings near Aberdeen.
I'd say one of the intrinsic, critical elements is change. If the series hadn't been capable of fundamental change, it would've been cancelled in 1966.
As I already said, I don't see that as a fair comparison, because changing the sex of the Doctor would not make the series any less British. It's always had female leads, so it wouldn't be a fundamental change of identity for the series in the way that an American Doctor would or a transformed TARDIS would.
I honestly don't understand why the Doctor's maleness is fundamental to his iconic status. He was never defined by his sexuality in the original series. True, he filled the traditional male role of the intellectual and the authority figure, but we're well past the time when such roles were rigidly defined by gender. The series itself started breaking down those gender roles as soon as Sarah Jane Smith and Leela showed up.
I don't think there really is any category of role anymore that must be filled by a male character. Women can be action heroes, authority figures, world leaders, scientists, comic-book geeks, you name it. Even the love interest for a female character doesn't have to be male in this day and age. By the same token, I don't think there's any traditionally female role that can't be filled by a male character.
An on the subject of women playing traditionally male roles...
Although I say "traditionally" but this bit was interesting.
And of course back in Bill Shakespeare’s time all his female characters were played by blokes, just to show how times change
I’m definitely increasingly coming around to the idea. To be honest as I’ve said the only worry for me now is all the crap/baggage that would sadly come with such a casting.
Although I say "traditionally" but this bit was interesting.
And of course back in Bill Shakespeare’s time all his female characters were played by blokes, just to show how times change
I’m definitely increasingly coming around to the idea. To be honest as I’ve said the only worry for me now is all the crap/baggage that would sadly come with such a casting.
To change the gender of the Doctor would be less of a breach of canon than to temporarily fix the Chameleon circuit and turn the TARDIS into a giant pumpkin in someone's garden. So I say let's do both.
But one thing that should never EVER happen is for the the TARDIS to materialize as a phone booth. If that does happen I am not watching any Doctor Who ever again in the next 25 minutes.
But one thing that should never EVER happen is for the the TARDIS to materialize as a phone booth. If that does happen I am not watching any Doctor Who ever again in the next 25 minutes.
^If you're going to bring the dreaded word "canon" into it, I'd call that possibly the most mutable part of Doctor Who, right up there with the inherent mutability of the Doctor himself (and the TARDIS too -- let's remember that even though it's always a police box on the outside, it's been many different police boxes over the years, and has changed its interior form and character as often as the Doctor has changed his outsides).
Even ones that involve labor and childbirth? Cleopatra? Juliet? Blanche Duboit? Scarlett O'hara? Come on, man. The life-experience of each gender is different, at least for humans. While gender-swapping can be pulled off sometimes, it's a stretch to say that all roles can be successfully swapped.
It seemed that the trill of DS9 were invented in order to joke around with the idea of gender-swapping and bisexuality, but that's not the idea behind regeneration in doctor who and to go down that road would just be a distraction.
Hm....
Mid-season 10 Capaldi's Doctor manages to fall into the library instead of the swimming pool, and regenerates into a woman. Much like Twelve, the Thirteenth Doctor finds it difficult to operate the TARDIS at first. Curiously, she has no issues with flying it, but she mangles the desktop theme, and half of the interior turns into a two-dimensional 8bit dungeon. Trying to fix it, she accidentally activates the Chameleon circuit and the TARDIS turns into a dalek. A very worrying development given the circuit's intended function, and given that neither the Doctor nor Clara could exit through the stump to around look for real daleks.
The Doctor doesn't remember anything, she doesn't even recognize the Victorian street her dalek is sitting on, but one disturbing memory immediately surfaces when Clara comes out with a soufflé she cooked in the 8bit fireplace and without any eggs. Since she doesn't remember the Time of the Doctor, she is convinced that this is the way Clara dies and carries on burdened through the rest of the episode. She channels Eleven in the moments River's death has been coming up, even mixing the two up because River's fate was similar.
Meanwhile, Strax finds the TARDIS, and thinking it is a dead dalek, and brings it straight into the kitchen where Vastra and Jenny are waiting for him to cook Jenny's dinner, creating a little disturbance with it. As the gang is out investigating the origin of the dead dalek, the Doctor partially fixes the circuit and the TARDIS becomes a fridge. As they exit, she notes that it is the only nuclear war grade she has ever seen.
In the morning, Strax brings out bananas for breakfast, and gives them forward, accidentally repeating the Doctor's comment:
"Eat your breakfast, boy, the protein-rich content of these cucumbers is excellent for your health and their highly-radioactive potassium gives you all the energy you need in battle. I must say the whole new fridge is excellent, it is the first nuclear war grade fridge I have ever seen."
They rush into the kitchen to investigate the mystery of how a fridge has appeared in the 19th century, but there ain't one, and there's no sign of the dalek either. (Meanwhile, Harrison Ford is shown running inside the TARDIS, solving another unexplained breach of physics...)
P.S. Maybe I am the only one who likes that, but the more a "canon" gets violated, the more I like it, whether one exists or not.
Okay, those, but that's about it.
I meant "role" in the sense of a general type of persona or function, not specific characters.
Obviously, but there are also plenty of differences within each gender, and it's naive to overlook that. It's not like every man in the world is way over here and every woman in the world is way over there. They're bell curves that have a lot of overlap. (Visual illustration.)
Again, I meant "roles" as in broad categories and character types -- e.g. homemaker, caregiver, teacher, secretary, hostage in need of rescuing, romantic interest, stripper, etc. These are traditionally filled by female characters, but there's no reason they can't also be filled by male characters, in the same way that roles such as action hero, president, business magnate, and the like are no longer strictly limited to male characters the way they were in the past. My point is that gender roles in fiction and society today are not as strictly segregated as they once were.
Umm, no, the Trill were invented in TNG's "The Host," and though it touched on gender-swapping, it was hardly in a joking way -- more a borderline-homophobic way. DS9 picked up on the concept of the Trill and handled it far better. While it did occasionally acknowledge the fact that Trill hosts come in both sexes, and occasionally addressed the ramifications of that, it was simply one of multiple ramifications of the host-symbiont relationship and was hardly treated as a mere joke.
The idea behind regeneration was to keep the series alive by recasting the lead role. It later became a way to keep the series fresh and adaptable by periodically reinterpreting the lead role in a new way. How is it a "distraction" to do the very thing that the series has embraced doing for 48 years?
And of course back in Bill Shakespeare’s time all his female characters were played by blokes, just to show how times change
We're having two different conversations here. I've spent quite a lot of time in the theater world, where anyone can play any role and no one bats an eye, so as far as I'm concerned, yes, a black woman can play Richard III and an old Korean actor can play Juliet. That's part of the conventions of contemporary theater and there's really nothing wrong with that.
Though it's been attempted in films too, blind casting is very rare in cinema or on television: the audience is not accustomed to it and in a word where a blond James Bond was an issue, some people may react quite vehemently if a women were playing a man's role.
It seems to me though, that it's not quite what we're debating here. We're talking about the Doctor, who spent two thousand years as a man, suddenly regenerating into a woman. Would he then become a woman? Would he feel like a woman or like a man trapped in a man's body? Would she still be the Doctor? Would it change the dynamics of the show?
Worth pointing out that one of the most successful and popular film heroes of our age, Ellen Ripley, was written as male and cast as female, which is why she worked so well -- because Hollywood traditionally writes male characters simply as characters while writing female characters specifically as "female characters" with all the stereotypes and limitations appended thereunto. Which is a stupid double standard, and the only way to overcome it, the only way to let actresses really play great characters, is to just stop treating gender as the overriding defining feature of any human being, fictional or otherwise. It's just one facet of a personality. Anyone who says "Character X is a great character because of their sex" is missing the point. The great characters are the ones who are written as people rather than as categories. Because if you go in with the attitude "This character is defined by being female" or "This character is defined by being Japanese," then you write a stereotype, not a person.
Now that we know Time Lords can change sex (thanks to the mention of the Corsair in "The Doctor's Wife"), I'm frankly surprised the Doctor hasn't done it already. He's not the type who would be content to stay in an unchanging rut forever. He gets bored if he isn't trying new things. I can't believe he wouldn't be thrilled at the opportunity to discover what it was like to be female for a change. It's like his constant disappointment at never being ginger. He's never been ginger, so he wants to be. Imagine how thrilled he'd be to discover he had breasts. (No, wait, that came out wrong...)
Then again, though, he's never seemed to have much control over his regenerations, not compared to someone like Romana. He's always treated it as a crapshoot, something he had no control over. The one time he was able to determine what form he regenerated into (without help from the Sisterhood of Karn) was his eleventh regeneration in "Journey's End," when he managed to maintain his existing form, and that was only with the special circumstance of having his severed hand to dump the leftover energy into. This latest time, it's suggested that he subconsciously chose his new face as a message to himself, but he didn't do it on purpose and doesn't know how it happened.
So maybe regenerative sex change is something that takes a particular effort of will, a level of control over the process that the Doctor has never managed before. But maybe, in the wake of his War Doctor regeneration and his Metacrisis regeneration and now the onset of his new cycle of regenerations, he's gradually gaining more experience at how to influence the form he takes. Heck, he's already regenerated once more than most Time Lords ever did, and he's got another eleven tries with his current cycle, so that's an opportunity to gain even more practice. So he might eventually reach the point where he's capable of a gender-reassignment regeneration (a regenderation?
).
Etheric beam locators.
For the first film, maybe (although I doubt they intended to have a male Ripley walk around in cotton briefs for half the picture) but the writing for Ripley in Aliens especially takes into account her gender, paying up her motherly tendencies with Newt and setting up a final catfight situation with the Alien queen. If you were to transpose Ripley back to male, it would not achieve the same resonance.
So it's not like I'm totally disagreeing with you on principle as far as unusual casting and breaking traditional gender-roles. I just disagree that it would be desirable to give The Doctor a female regeneration. I think you have to treat these things on a case-by-case basis and not just make a sweeping generalization that gender never matters.
I think if the intention is to insert some more modern feminist activism into a genre otherwise known for a lot of damsel-in-distress companions, bring back an existing female time-lord like Romana and have her portrayed in a more modernist, 21st century way.
Not the point. It's not about changing the gender of a specific character, it's about whether actresses get the chance to play roles that are written as something more than just "the girl." Ripley is a great character because the foundations that were laid for her in the first film were not limited by gender stereotypes, because she was written as a fully dimensional character like any other rather than being defined primarily by her gender. That's why it's totally wrong to say the Doctor is iconic because he's male. He's iconic because he's a great, multifaceted character, and that's rarely the case with characters who are defined by their sex.
I'm not saying any such thing. I'm saying it's not an absolute, impassable barrier. Male and female are not separate and incompatible entities, they're simply variations on a theme. Men and women have the same basic attributes, just in different proportions and arrangements. It's a difference in nuance, not an absolute opposition.
And what makes the Doctor interesting is all the ways that the character has been able to change, to bring new nuance and variety to the role while still retaining the fundamentals. Having the occasional female Doctor in the mix would just be continuing that pattern. It's just one more variation on the theme, and variations on the theme are what Doctor Who is all about.
Feminism is just the recognition that people are equal regardless of sex. And as long as you say "Women are never allowed to be X," that they can be the sidekick but never the hero, you do not have equality.
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