The best worst reactions to the news that the next Doctor Who will be a woman

The most recent previous example (the apparent male guard captain on Gallifrey that regenerated to apparent female) mentioned that she was happy to be back as a woman.

The Master/Missy appears to have become less evil as a woman, but who knows, I haven’t finished Season 10 yet (no unmarked spoilers pls)

It appears to me to be likely that Time Lords have a “usual gender” that they are most frequently regenerated into, but occasionally a fluke causes them to switch for one generation.

Another possibility is, the chance of a Time Lord being female is 1 in 13 or so, which explains why most Time Lords are apparent male. How that works biologically, is I think less likely than the “Usual gender” theory.

I haven’t seen a female>male regen, though it’s implied to happen to the previously mentioned guard captain because she’s happy to be female again. “How do you deal with all that ego?”

Don’t tell these men about Captain Jack Harkness, the gay (near?-) immortal who once hid a ray gun somewhere on his person while nude. Their brains will explode.

@krazyjoe Statistics don’t work the way you think they do. The current sample population of Time Lords shows that the probability of a male time lord regening male is much higher than 50%, but less than 100%. You’ll have to rethink that whole argument.

Calling David a baby in your argument against calling people babies isn’t very helpful to that point either.

@Katz,
War Hamsters are so cuuuuuuuute!

Thanks. I love them because they’re so simple to draw. Their body is a blob and you can put legs on it basically anywhere. (But I’m no good at comics, hence I didn’t even make it to the end of the first arc.)

A thought occurred to me about the whole regeneration thing, prompted most likely because I recently read Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves.

There were hints all the last season that the Doctor has some influence over regeneration, at least able to try to suppress it and “hold it in” (unsuccessfully if badly enough damaged). Possibly there’s some influence on the course it takes as well, or even determined by the environment and the circumstances leading up to the death. That thought then put me in mind of Kath Two and “going epi” in Seveneves.

Which makes perfect sense if Time Lords are biologically immortal, rather than as a result of technological advancements obtained later on (and possibly anyway). After all, an immortal that regenerates when something else would have simply died will be immune to normal Darwinian selection. So how are they to adapt to changes in the environment and avoid becoming so maladapted, eventually, that they’re stuck regenerating all the damn time, or this capacity gets exhausted and eventually does kill them — all at once, resulting in extinction?

Answer: some variation on the notion of “going epi”, in response to sufficient damage, in which case yes the circumstances surrounding the incident will influence the changes, so that the next Doctor will be better adapted to whatever changes in the environment might have led to the damage.

At this point, it’s bleeding obvious why the Doctor would regenerate female: obviously, this would be a sensible response to an environment with a skewed sex ratio. Just as some frogs can spontaneously change sex when surrounded by too many of the same sex, as Ian Malcolm points out in Jurassic Park.

The Doctor is regenerating to female because TV characters are 80% male! 🙂

I’ve never been into Warhammer 40K, like, at all – but I’d definitely be in for Warhamster 40K!

Anyway…

@Gussie Jives:

This is why I find media awareness and savvy so important and I worry that in the memefied social media landscape that the deeper analysis of media is getting so lost that even plots that have been done before and better suddenly seem “new” just because the superficial elements have been changed and some boobs thrown in.

While I don’t necessarily agree with the examples you give (I think the people reacting to the Red Wedding are doing so due to how it was done rather than anything else), but I’m not going to be so quick to condemn you as a few others have – because I get where you’re coming from and have felt the same way many times.

Though every story has been told, the way in which they’re told is important and it’s hard to not feel that standards have been dropping these days in one way or another.

An example I’d use would be New Doom.

There’s no problem with the game being a throwback to the first two titles from the 90’s. It was, if only for a single playthrough (for me anyway), a refreshing throwback to the earlier days of first-person shooters but with the benefit of new and better tech.

That’s perfectly fine and everything – but I’ll admit my annoyance when it’s being given hyperbolic accolades wherein various individuals like Ben Croshaw and Jim Sterling are putting it into their Top 5 of 2016 lists. There’s another person I’d mention – whose even worse about it than either Croshaw or Sterline were – but I’m pretty sure many here would sycophantically come to his defense regardless of what I say about him or his endorsement of the game, sounding as if he were paid by Bethesda so they could quote him on the box art. It makes his subsequent rant about how bad capitalism feel aggravatingly disingenuous and even a bit pandering…

Why? Oh, because it isn’t another brown-and-gray “realistic” military FPS.

Like, really?

That is the metric for which we’re heaping praise on something instead of doing anything new or interesting with the material? This “it’s different from the rest at the moment, so it’s good” mentality is unbelievably lazy because it being different only matters when it is done well. When done poorly, it doesn’t really matter how “different” it is – unless you’re just that willing to settle for “okay” rather than “good” or “great.”

There was a Cracked.com article from ages back that brings up another facet of the issue, in the form of Joss Whedon fans:

It’s like hearing someone brag about their personal library and you find out it’s filled with nothing but Star Wars novels and Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books. I know they’re printed on pulped trees and bought at a Borders, but that doesn’t make them real books. Consuming those is an exercise in stunting your ability to appreciate real storytelling. I wouldn’t trust a food critic if all he ever grubbed on were hot dogs, and I don’t trust Whedonites when their experience with moving pictures begins and ends with Mutant Enemy productions. Once More With Feeling shouldn’t be a goddamn Rocky Horror Picture Show. Fuck, it’s not even a good musical. But then, you’d have to have watched another musical to know that.

http://www.cracked.com/article/166_5-reasons-it-sucks-being-joss-whedon-fan/

This is something I’d attach to a lot of comicbook fans who often complain about the changes made in live-action adaptations. One can’t help but think their worldview is so insular that they simply don’t understand that film and television, as an audio-visual medium, is not going to operate exactly like a comicbook. Even the way they talk about films and TV shows are mired by their obsessive devotion to comicbooks and unable to simply enjoy what a film or television does with the material on its own. As someone who was raised around the television and film industry due to having a boom operator and sound engineer as a father – it’s like hearing small children discover something for the first time, but lacking any open-mindedness or wonder that comes with such.

Then again, same goes for a lot of gamers. They’re so mechanistic in their mentality that things like “story” and “character” and “themes” are just afterthoughts compared to the gameplay and graphics – which translates to how they enjoy other mediums as well. I remember when Lisa Foiles saw District 9 and nothing seemed to register with her other than some of the effects were cool when it came to the high-tech weaponry and the CGI for the Prawns. Someone (an animator at Pixar, I believe) had to pretty much explain to her that it was about the South African Apartheid and how many aspects of the film make reference to it. Me? I was pretty astonished, but not in a good way, that someone could sit through that entire movie and miss all those things.

@SFHC:

Christ, just shut up.

Sorry to have offended you, I guess…

Your post is indeed offensive.

The worst part of it is a quote : “It’s filled with nothing but Star Wars novels and Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books. I know they’re printed on pulped trees and bought at a Borders, but that doesn’t make them real books.”. It’s not like the rest of your post is *that* far from that shitty mentality.

@ cheese

That was a really interesting summary; cheers.

Time Lords do not have control over who they regenerate into

As confirmed by the Sisterhood of Karn. They can override that though of course “Time Lord science is elevated here. On Karn the change doesn’t have to be random.” And of course “man or woman” was one of the choices on offer.

Romana had complete control over regeneration. Of course she’s exceptionally bright even by Time Lord standards. It may also be she’s mates with the Sisterhood. Karn is just next door to Gallifrey so I like to imagine she pops over every now and then.

this concept is nothing new.

As mentioned previously, when I was a kid we all thought Joanna Lumley would be getting the gig. Especially when the retiring Tom Baker wished his successor luck “whoever he or she may be.”

@Nick:

The worst part of it is a quote : “It’s filled with nothing but Star Wars novels and Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books. I know they’re printed on pulped trees and bought at a Borders, but that doesn’t make them real books.”.

Yeah, as @Ohlmann says, that’s pretty offensive. Your point could have been made without these ignorant examples.

I also object to your uncharitable characterisation of comic fans.

One can’t help but think their worldview is so insular that they simply don’t understand that film and television, as an audio-visual medium, is not going to operate exactly like a comicbook.

In fact, one obviously can help but think that. One of us is doing it right now. There are lots of reasons why comic fans might get upset about arbitrary changes in film versions which have nothing to do with a lack of imagination or an appreciation of the film-maker’s art, let alone the childishness you ascribe to them.

For example, the sheer amount and complexity of material they have to draw on. A character’s behaviour might have been established in hundreds of comic books and it’s hardly unreasonable for fans to be annoyed when a film interpretation differs significantly.

I’m not a hardcore comics fan but it really boiled my piss when one of the movie versions of Spider-Man had biological webshooters. In the comics, Peter Parker invented and built those things. That was important, he’s a scientific/engineering genius and can make stuff like that. It’s an important part of his character. Making them biological was completely arbitrary as it added nothing in particular to the story (except brief awkwardness, which could have been done in a thousand other ways) and took a whole lot away from Parker’s character. It simplified the character, made it (ironically) more two dimensional. Without a good reason.

My point is that although fandom can make us roll our eyes and we all have to understand that movie versions (for instance) are intended for a wider audience and that stories must be told differently in different media, it is not unreasonable for fans to feel betrayed when a movie version misrepresents a strongly established character. They get to complain.

You come across as a common or garden snob.

(Also, I don’t see how this ridiculous policy — just fund the BBC out of the income
tax already, that way everyone contributes, including BBC Radio listeners, and it’s
no longer a regressive flat tax — can be enforced without pervasive state
surveillance of the interiors of private residences. Yikes.)

I’ve heard conflicting accounts of how reliable the “detector vans” are; that they only work if the “target” is watching on a CRT; that they only work by comparing against known broadcast signals; that they were completely for show, and the actual work was done by asking neighbours, watching for the telltale blue glow in the evenings, or gaining access to the property.

It’s by now really obviously unfair, and the “historical reasons” are wearing a bit thin. The latest insult was how they closed the iPlayer catch-up “loophole” (you didn’t used to need the license to watch shows *after* they were broadcast). They could have required people to sign in to access iPlayer (like other popular streaming services) and link accounts to licenses. But no, the law had to be updated to mention iPlayer specifically, while at the same time they didn’t bother updating the rest of the law to be BBC-specific, ie. permitting you to watch any other broadcaster’s output.

District 9 is fairly obviously intended to be about Zimbabwean refugees, but it interprets this theme via a lot of apartheid imagery. IMHO this is because it is difficult for South African to write about race without invoking that imagery. I imagine that it’s similarly difficult for Americans to write about race without seeing the Confederate flag in their mind’s eye.

So yeah. If a non-South African wants to interpret District 9 as being about apartheid then I can see where they’re coming from and can understand it. I have a different interpretation, but I’m a disciple of Barthes and Eco and am not gonna contest the point.

Ironically, there are a couple of series of Doctor Who choose-your-own-adventure style books, called ‘Decide Your Destiny’ – the 10th Doctor had the most, but 11 and 12 both have a few. Generally I donate them to our school library when I’m done, more to save space at home than because I’m embarrassed by the format.

I also like the Time Machine series of CYOA from the 80s; for nostalgia reasons, they sit next to my Target novelisations of classic-era Who.

The Who novel ‘Fear of the Dark’ suggests that there may be a pre-determined pattern to regeneration – the Fifth Doctor is shown a future version of himself being tortured to death, at which point he regenerates into (Colin Baker’s) sixth doctor; he then dies and becomes McCoy, so on. You can decide for yourself if this is even slightly canon.

Choose your own adventure books are pretty fucking awesome, as it happens. I was blown away when I spent my birthday book tokens on The Warlock of Firetop Mountain in, what, 1982?

They aren’t literature, but they are stories and some of them are well-told, all the moreso because of their interactivity. It’s also a seriously inventive idea.

Anyone want to read a blog by someone who bought a bunch of choose your own adventure books and replayed them as an adult, recording the results? Of course you do, it’s funny even if you didn’t read/play those books as a kid, especially as he doesn’t cheat and gets killed more often than not: https://fightingdantasy.blogspot.co.uk/

…

Okay… so someone wants to be stabbed by my copy of To Be or Not To Be: That Is The Adventure*. :3

* http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/ToBeOrNotToBeThatIsTheAdventure