I hope they do return to a more uniform set of outfits after Ncuti. Not an exaggerated costume with question marks all over it, just a slightly eccentric look that makes the Doctor stand out in any place and time period. Ten and Eleven did it pretty well with a consistent style that wasn't literally the same clothes every week. Thirteen went too far the other way and had me wishing she'd wear a different coat or t-shirt design sometimes.
The mistake with Whittaker’s costume was the same thing we see here — if you’re pushing the traditional boundaries of what background/gender is playing the Doctor for the first time, the way to do it is to do *everything else* traditionally. Even more Doctorish than Doctorish. And don’t chicken out. First woman Doctor never wore a skirt — or culottes — and now Ncuti sort-of-kind-of is. Leaning into ‘African’ (or at least, white media workers idea of African, but that’s a different topic…) for Ncuti may also be a mistake — though he is from a Rwandan background, he’s also Black British, and if that’s important from a representation point of view, that’s the focus. I think if I wanted to lean into that at all, I would have gone with something that is both more *obvious* than what they have done (a hat, just like Avery Books did over on Ds9 with Benny) and more subtle than all the only-know-it-from interviews stuff with etchings on sonics and unusual-for-the-Doctor shirts.
First Black Doctor, and he’s not usually dressed in keeping with the tradition before him. In fact, I would have brought back an old tradition for both of them — trying on previous Doctor’s outfits in the Tardis. It’s a way of cementing the character (or its alternative of having some or all of the first story in the predecessor outfit) and makes a useful statement.
It’s a way of dealing with ‘not the Doctor!’ types (aside from you know, actually writing the character like the Doctor, keeping the show the show, and not keeping your popular spare Doctor in a Garden in suburbia as a back up plan…) from the very start.
By doing things differently, there’s an underlying sense of ‘oh we have to do things different because they are x or y’. RTD has never had to best grasp of the costume it’s important anyway — like much else he cleaves to the contemporary. To set patterns, with no sense that he understands anything other than his own view of things. It’s why we always seem to start with a Blonde teen, like the old joke (from the cast from the sixties) that the companion is ‘something for the dads’. Ditto his obsession with soap opera stuff for the companion, which there just isn’t really time for now we’re down to eight episodes.
Anyway, speaking of which, I still haven’t found time to watch this. Ironic, as also haven’t seen Midnight. Never got round to it.
