Avoid Like the Plague: Doctor Who

I HAD to give it my lowest rating

December 1989 was the end of era and it felt like it.  Something good was coming to an end and we all knew it.  The eighties were all over but for the crying. Mind you bad things were ending too or at least changing. The Berlin Wall which had been a fixture of our lives for decades had fallen. Communist leaders were being dragged from their beds screaming. The Cold War had ended overnight it felt like. The last of the Boer presidents of South Africa resigned. Hirohito, who had been emperor of Japan since 1926 had died.  And a British TV show that had been on the air continuously since the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated, finished its last episode. 

Doctor Who wouldn’t return for another sixteen years.  Fans who had stuck around all that time called these the Wilderness Years.     

From a Dollars and Cents perspective (or Pounds and Pence if you prefer), canceling the show was an easy business decision. The audience wasn’t growing and costs were. The executives at the BBC took the view of, well there will be some bellyaching but they will forget about it soon enough.   

They didn’t.  The Whovians never gave up.

The home fires were kept burning in the 1990s in a number of ways.  The BBC finally accepted the harsh market reality that they had been so heroically resisting and started releasing Doctor Who on videotape. Although, only a few at a time.  They were so grudging about it, the BBC managed to keep interest going just by the rarity of the new releases.  Virgin Books picked up the contract for Doctor Who when Target let it slide.  Up until then, the books had been exclusively novelizations of episodes that had already aired, and naturally, these were written with kids in mind. Since there were no new episodes to adapt, the Virgin Doctor Who books began creating their own original content for the first time. Due to non-existent oversight by the BBC, these drifted into more mature themes for adult audiences since the audience was aging along with the stories it worked. 

Audio dramas were tentatively experimented with, they were few in number and featured Jon Pertwee’s third Doctor. 

Doctor Who fans were overjoyed in 1996 when a new Doctor Who TV movie with Paul McCann was announced. Then they actually saw it.  Its fundamental problem was that the BBC had partnered with the FOX network to finance it, which proved conclusively that Americans can’t make Doctor Who. If nothing else the disappointment proved that people still cared. 

In 1999 Big Finish took over the audio adaptations and introduced a degree of professionalism that hadn’t been seen before. That was also the year that Star Wars returned with the Special Edition, Star Trek hadn’t left, and a non-conical Doctor Who appeared on a Comic Relief special called The Curse of Fatal Death, (written by Stephen Moffat). 

The Doctor’s return was clearly becoming more of a “when” than an “if.”

In 2005, when the Doctor took Rose’s hand and said, “Run!” The wilderness years were over.  

Last Saturday, the Doctor walked back into the woods.  

The show isn’t canceled because technically it has never been canceled, it’s just being given another “rest.”  Besides you couldn’t possibly use the word “canceled” when you go as far off the Woke deep-end as Doctor Who did. That wouldn’t be an admission of failure, it would be an admission of complete rejection.

Disney Doctor Who felt like a parody from the start. It was Doctor Who as written by Jon Waters. It genuinely felt like Russel T. Davies was making fun of his own time on the show, in the 2000s. Truth be told I don’t think he has anywhere near enough talent for that.  In 2005 he came to the show wanting to use it as a platform to tell his stories about the Doctor. In 2024 he returned to it to use it as a political platform.  

This season of Doctor Who was so politically driven that even leftie newspapers were saying, lay off the Woke crap.

When you have a show that is this far off the rails it means that the company that bought it, while financially obligated to keep paying for it, has written it off so completely that no one is bothering to read the scripts anymore. The last three episodes were so bad that I’m not sure anyone was bothering to write them either.  It had all of those weird little ticks of verbal dyskinesia that strongly indicate the script was mostly written by an AI that Russel T Davies had trained with last season’s scripts.  It’s a pity he didn’t use his first season’s scripts; it would have been a much better show. This season was purest clown world.  If I was making a sarcastic, mocking sendup of what I thought a completely Woke Doctor Who would be like, I am not sure I could have done better.

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I’m in this really bad position of trying to make fun of something that is so bad that nothing I can say will get more laughs than what I saw. I can’t even make jokes about him being gay because it’s old hat at this point, the last four Doctors introduced have been gay. Whitaker, Tenant (2), Gatwa and they brought back Jo Martin for one scene to make her a lesbian. 

This season did have an objective; to attack the longtime fans of the show, it was the Joker II of Doctor Who. That is what the final eight episodes of Doctor Who did, attack the long-time fans of the show who hated the fact that people like Russel T. Davies and Chris Chibnall had utterly ruined it.  Granted, Davies is now by far the more hated.

Even the BBC, you know the company that actually owns Doctor Who, condemned it as “nothing but an intolerant program.”

The last episode was a two-parter.  It started with the condemnation of the normal two-parent - male and female family, with a kid.  Ncuti Gatwa was a terrible choice for the Doctor, you need someone with range as an actor and he just doesn’t have it.  He can play an African gay man and that’s it.  He can handle camp just fine and he can certainly cry at the drop of a hat, but crying is and of itself not acting. 

He wakes up in bed with a woman who is supposed to be his wife and it’s too laughable to take seriously.  Rock Hudson could make it work, Gatwa can’t.  The wife is Gatwa’s current companion, they have a daughter named Poppy.  Poppy does look like Gatwa and not at all like his Pakistani compadre.  Everybody lives like the Doctor and his “wife” and they are all happy.  This is a horror beyond comprehension to a gay Boomer like Russel T. Davies. 

This world is now ruled over by an incel-pickup artist named Conrad (yeah real subtle). Who was given a wish-baby by an old Timelord enemy of the Doctor’s called The Rani. You’re probably wondering what the hell do I mean by a wish-baby.  Well, you make a wish and then you kiss the baby’s forehead and the wish comes true.  I can actually feel my will to live being sucked out of my body just by writing those words.

Doubt is not allowed in this world.  If you doubt in Conrad’s England you will be jailed, (if you go far enough Woke you can accidentally reach Based). Anyway, the Doctor is saved by the power of his Gay, when he notices a guy is hot and that makes him doubt he is straight.  No one believed for a second that he was straight. Gay Exceptionalism saves the day.

So, the Rani’s plan was to use doubt in Conrad’s world to break through the reality barrier to the nightmare dimension where the Timelord Omega has been imprisoned since The Three Doctors episode in 1973.  Omega was the first Timelord, except the Little Black Girl Doctor from the Timeless Child is now the first Timelord but in this episode, it’s back to being Omega because Fuck It! That’s why!

The Timelords had been wiped out again by the Timeless Child episode. Which made the two remaining Timelords sterile. First we’ve ever heard it about but since they are both gay and uninclined to “take one for the team” the Timelords were extinct anyway.  The Rani wants to use The Omega (I assume he used the definite article THE rest of the remaining Timelords do), to science-magic the Timelords back into existence because see the last sentence of the previous paragraph.

The Rani gets her wish but The Omega is now The CG monster so he eats her.  Something finally consistent with canon.  Omega HATED the Timelords and wanted to wipe them all out. The Doctor uses the power of the Gay to force Omega to go away again.  

Ruby shows up and steals the wish-baby from Conrad and wishes everything away again.  This included the Doctor’s baby.

The Rani knew about her, but since Poppy had filthy human DNA she was out of the running as something useful. What followed next was some Disney scrapbooking that erased the setups for the next season because Mickey the Great and Terrible informed Davies that there damn good and well wasn’t going to be a next season, and I wish to hell I’d never heard of you!

The quest for Poppy was supposed to be next season’s story arc along with finding the Doctor’s granddaughter Susan from Hartnell years. But that was all airbrushed away in reshoots.

You could spot the reshoots because Poppy was about six inches taller.

The Doctor destroys himself to magic Poppy back into existence.  I strongly suspect that he was just supposed to start a regeneration sequence and then the credits would roll but a last-minute abomination was stapled on by having the Doctor regenerate into Rose.  No, not the black teenager trans that Davies is so in love with, but the real one played by Billie Piper.  It’s assumed it was part of a last-minute plea to Disney. 

This wasn’t a finale it was a funeral, and the undertaker wired the corpse to be giving his mourners two middle fingers.

In the end, this wasn’t just bad Doctor Who—it was anti-Doctor Who. A shrill, directionless, AI-scripted fever dream written by a man who now seems to loathe the franchise’s history and its fans. What was once clever, charming, and strange was in the end loud, smug, and hollow. The Doctor hasn’t just wandered back into the wilderness—he’s been abandoned there to be eaten by Bad Wolf.

I never thought I’d say this about Doctor Who but given its raw hatred of its fanbase and blithering narrative incompetence I have no choice but to pronounce my doom upon it. 

The Dark Herald Says Avoid Doctor Who Like the Plague. (0/5)