Doctor Who – New Dawn: Essays on the Jodie Whittaker era

By Manchester University Press

Doctor Who – new dawn explores the latest cultural moment in this long-running BBC TV series: the casting of a female lead. Analysing showrunner Chris Chibnall and Jodie Whittaker’s era means considering contemporary Doctor Who as an inclusive, regendered brand. Featuring original interview material with cast members, this edited collection also includes an in-depth discussion with Segun Akinola, composer of the iconic theme tune’s current version.

The book critically address the series’ representations of diversity, as well as fan responses to the thirteenth Doctor via the likes of memes, cosplay and even translation into Spanish as a grammatically gendered language. In addition, concluding essays look at how this moment of Who has been merchandised, especially via the ‘experience economy’, and how official/unofficial reactions to UK lockdown helped the show to further re-emphasise its public-service potential.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Oct 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9781526151865

Book preview

Introduction: New Dawn, new moment

Brigid Cherry, Matt Hills, and Andrew O’Day

When officially promoting series 11 of BBC Studio’s Doctor Who, a brief teaser featured the tagline ‘It’s About Time’. In part, this self-consciously referenced the programme’s history: a similar slogan (‘He’s back … and it’s about time!’) had been used to market the show’s return in 1996, with Paul McGann playing the new Doctor on that occasion. But the highly self-reflexive advertisement in 2018 surely traded on Jodie Whittaker’s casting as the first female incarnation of the Doctor, just as another 20-second trailer in the ‘It’s About Time’ campaign did – this time, Whittaker’s Doctor was depicted as breaking a glass ceiling and muttering ‘oops’ after a cloud of slow-motion SFX shards had spectacularly settled. However unsubtle the sight gag may have been, this self-consciously positioned 2018’s series 11 of the BBC SF TV series (2005–) as a new beginning for Doctor Who, especially since its change in lead actor was accompanied by new companions, a new TARDIS design for both interior and exterior, a new logo, and a new title sequence complete with, yes, a new arrangement of the theme tune. Added to which, Jodie Whittaker had been cast by a new showrunner, Chris Chibnall, with whom she had previously worked on the post-Nordic-Noir crime series Broadchurch (2013–17).

The symbolic handover from previous showrunner Steven Moffat to Chris Chibnall was thus just one part of a major rebranding for the show where, as Matt Hills has argued, ‘re-invigorating Doctor Who has meant a display of professional distinction on the part of [incoming] production teams. Not only is Who’s narrative re-oriented as a kind of palimpsest, and its characterization reworked, but the show’s icons are visually reconstructed: it is literally given a new look’ (2015: 321). Such changes have always been a part of the programme’s history – its ‘classic’ incarnation having run from 1963 to 1989 – leading John Tulloch and Manuel Alvarado in Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text, the first academic monograph on Doctor Who in the early 1980s, to suggest that ‘it is the … companions and … actorial expression of the Doctor himself who are regularly expelled in the programme’s search for idiosyncrasy and … individualism’ (1983: 97). This periodic casting of new lead actors – along with other dimensions of rebranding – enables changing production communities to perform the ‘good television discourse of television professionals … [i.e.] that something similar but different is required to re-invigorate a tired format’ (Tulloch and Alvarado, 1983: 63).

From the perspective of Doctor Who production discourse, then, and its institutional placement as public service TV and a BBC ‘global flagship’ production, it is plausible to view Jodie Whittaker’s casting as the thirteenth Doctor as a new moment, if not a ‘New Dawn’, for the programme, and hence as a textual regeneration which can be discerned, even at this relatively close range, as the initiation of a new phase in the show’s longer history. Writing in ‘Periodising Doctor Who’, Paul Booth cautions against treating the division of the programme into distinct phases as an ‘ontological assessment’ (2014: 196). The danger is that this can lead to a reductive and ‘totalising principle’ which interprets the corpus of Doctor Who purely via discrete and favoured (or disliked) eras (Booth, 2014: 205), thereby tending to discipline fan and academic readings alike. Contra such assumptions, and such reading protocols, Booth argues that ‘we must see Doctor Who as both a continuous programme split into fragmented parts and as a series of fragments cohered [in]to a whole at the same time’ (2014: 197), and it is just such an approach that is adopted here. Consequently, the ‘New Dawn’ of our book title represents both a self-reflexive moment of textual rupture, change and discontinuity for Doctor Who and, at the same time, a moment of textual sameness and continuity – as Tulloch and Alvarado noted, the ongoing ‘success of the programme (its audience size and longevity) must depend on this other success (its tension between novelty and sameness)’ (1983: 63).

With this kept in mind, James Chapman has sought to periodize Doctor Who into different historical ‘moments’, drawing on Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott’s Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero (1987) as an analytical template. Chapman’s ‘moments’ are not merely textual, however, and instead start to bridge text and cultural context. He argues that the programme’s history can be separated into four broad phases – 1960s ‘Dalekmania’ (2014: 47) (an intense moment of commercial/consumerist and public service popularity), 1970s ‘institutionalised ritual’ (2014: 49) (or mainstream TV and UK cultural success), the 1980s shift from mainstream to cult (2014: 52), and then a noughties reimagining as a ‘global brand’ (2014: 54). Chapman’s analysis has the benefit of not entirely following standardized fan discourses of periodization, which tend to be based around lead actor or producer/script-editor teams, but it also demonstrates the importance of articulating textual, institutional, and reception contexts.

The chapters which follow focus on the current (fifth?) ‘moment’ in Doctor Who history, which following Chapman (2014) we would dub ‘Doctor Who as inclusive brand’. The programme and its latest creative leads have quite clearly responded to contemporary debates around Who’s prior masculinist hegemony and the ‘longer-term arc of meaning in the series … [displayed by] its privileging of a white male perspective’ (Jowett, 2017: 179). Arguably, this latest version of Doctor Who has sought to emulate progressive regenderings already carried out by other major SF franchises such as Star Wars (1977–) and Battlestar Galactica (2004–9), making it more of a pop-cultural emulator, perhaps, rather than a public service TV groundbreaker.

It is crucial to contextualize this most recent format of Doctor Who in terms of contemporary media production cultures, particularly considering it as an example of the casting of female actors in traditionally male roles. Doctor Who can be placed as an example of ‘gender swapping’ developments, or what has been termed ‘gender-blind’ casting, alongside an array of examples such as the Ghostbusters reboot (2016) as well as characters including Thor, 007, Starbuck, Doctor Smith in Lost in Space (2018–), and Watson in Elementary (2012–19). Such regendering has become an important aspect of gender representations more broadly, but it has also proved divisive amongst sections of the audience. As Pauline Maclaran and Cele Otnes point out in ‘Reinvigorating the Sherlock Myth’ in Contemporary Consumer Culture Theory, what they term ‘gender bending’ in the TV series Elementary can ‘reinforce or subvert gender norms’ whilst ‘reinvigorating a brand’s mythology’ (2017: 153).

Extending this argument, Doctor Who – New Dawn further considers the unfolding brand narrative or identity of Doctor Who in the light of J.P. Telotte’s discussion (2014: 109–14) of the regendering of Starbuck and Boomer in Battlestar Galactica, considering how narrative and characterization in Doctor Who are, in some senses, comparably affected. However, we would argue that Doctor Who acts as a distinctive example of textual gender-swapping: this remains diegetically integral to the previously established science fiction character and narrative developments of the series, in comparison to other SF franchises where remakes and new adaptations have instead allowed for recasting, or where entirely new characters have taken on a storyworld prominence, e.g. the figure of Rey (Daisy Ridley) in Star Wars. In contrast, Doctor Who has facilitated rather different genre and storyworld opportunities for gender-swap casting which operates within established continuity, given that the character of the Doctor has been played by many actors across the history of the series thanks to the narrative concept of regeneration. Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor is, hyperdiegetically speaking, the exact same character as played by Peter Capaldi, Matt Smith, David Tennant, and Christopher Eccleston before her, with all the narrative memories of their incarnations’ adventures and psychologies.

Prior to Chris Chibnall’s decision to cast a female Doctor, the notion had previously been treated in the programme’s cultural history as a vague provocation or as somewhat comedic, such as when John Nathan-Turner teased the press and public with the notion of a female actor replacing Tom Baker in the classic series in the 1980s, or when Joanna Lumley very briefly played the role in ‘The Curse of Fatal Death’, a non-canonical Comic Relief special written by Steven Moffat in 1999. And despite the nuances and structures of Moffat’s gendered representations in his scripts sometimes being called into question for alleged sexism, when he was showrunner of the series from 2010 to 2017 he nevertheless introduced narrative developments that prepared for the possibility of a future female Doctor. This included referring to ostensibly male Time Lords having female incarnations, showing the onscreen male-to-female regeneration of a Time Lord General, and introducing an incarnation of the villainous Master played – as Missy – by Michelle Gomez from 2014 to 2017.

Recalling Paul Booth’s (2014) cautionary note, this collection of essays nonetheless considers how the female thirteenth Doctor opens up the range of receptions of the programme (for example, attracting and inspiring new audiences). Repositioning Who as a more ‘inclusive brand’ is not only a matter of performing progressive cultural politics, of course, it is also a (potentially commercial, transnational) strategy aimed at targeting and maintaining a diversity of new viewers and fans. Indeed, this illustrates that textual and institutional analyses are never sufficient by themselves – the reception of Doctor Who’s self-reflexive new era, and its rebranding and regendering, also needs to be studied. To this end, the collection analyses memes that were created and circulated in reaction to Whittaker’s casting and performance in the role, as well as detailing fan creativity in the forms of thirteenth Doctor cosplay and action figure collecting or customizing. But as well as discussing specific fan responses and practices, this collection also engages with the social-media-cultural context in which the latest era of Doctor Who is compelled to operate. By this, we mean that Doctor Who’s new dawn confronts an increasingly ‘fractured fandom’ (Reinhard, 2018) where divisions between fan ‘haters’ and appreciators have become especially pronounced around the work of Chris Chibnall as showrunner and Jodie Whittaker as lead actor. So-called ‘Big Name Fans’ such as Ian Levine have symbolically attacked the production team headed by Chibnall, publicly lamenting on Twitter (10 August 2019) that ‘tiny minorities of SJWs will always shout the loudest’ in defence of the programme’s regendering and creative decisions. Yet, as Adrienne Massanari and Shira Chess have argued, ‘the emerging alt-right has repositioned … [SJW] to imply a kind of monstrous feminine: unwieldy and out of control’ (2018: 2). Where ‘SJW’ becomes a label of abuse, the term is othered in ways which align it, implicitly or explicitly, with alt-right concepts of the ‘social justice warrior’ as irrational, or as an overly emotional ‘crybaby’ (2018: 9). In this reception context, and drawing on common social media discourses, Doctor Who fandom starts to become very visibly and affectively ‘fractured’ along cultural-political faultlines.

Doctor Who’s regendering also places it squarely in the domain of what Sarah Banet-Weiser has analysed as ‘popular feminism’, with feminist politics manifest ‘in popular and commercial media … [via] an accessibility that is not confined to academic enclaves or niche groups’ whilst simultaneously becoming ‘a terrain of struggle, a space where competing demands for power battle it out’ (2018: 1). This popularity is frequently countered by a patriarchal backlash, or what Banet-Weiser terms ‘popular misogyny’ (2018: 2). Both popular feminism and popular misogyny are ‘networked’ discourses, moving through broadcast or social media and everyday life. Similarly, Suzanne Scott has analysed the emergence of ‘spreadable misogyny’, circulated online within media fandoms (2019: 83), with fanboys tending to label or dismiss ‘female fans’ affect as performative or inauthentic’ (2019: 85), i.e. (newbie) female fans supposedly do fandom all wrong. From these influential theoretical positions, it can be seen that gendered discourses are as much a critical aspect of Doctor Who fans’ contemporary and social media reception contexts as they are a matter of textual regendering or industrial rebranding.

In terms of this book’s overall approach, and the sections which follow, our main aims and objectives are hence to position this self-reflexively, paratextually promoted new ‘era’ (Booth, 2014) or ‘moment’ (Bennett and Woollacott, 1987; Chapman, 2014) of Doctor Who in its tripartite contexts of industry or institution, textual meaning-making, and fan or audience reception. In particular, this means remaining cognizant of current production discourses of franchise and brand management (and thus the shift to an ‘inclusive brand’ as a matter of franchise renewal and now-ness as much as a matter of cultural politics). And it means considering current social media discourses of fandom (and anti-fandom) within which ‘popular feminism’ and ‘popular misogyny’ or ‘spreadable misogyny’ have been enacted around, and in relation to, Doctor Who’s textual regendering and industrial rebranding.

Accordingly, and since the regendering of the Doctor represents an attempt to redress gender imbalance in terms of recasting the lead, whilst Chibnall’s role as showrunner has meant overseeing a more diverse production team, Doctor Who – New Dawn also pays attention to David Peetz and Georgina Murray’s account of gender gaps in the workplace in Women, Labor Segmentation and Regulation (2017). We link their approach to how series 11 resisted TV production’s operational ‘norms that privilege males and male behaviours at the expense of females’ (2017: 238). Perhaps the most important rationale for this collection is that it sets out an account of this inclusive-brand ‘era’ of Doctor Who not only in relation to the regendering of the Doctor but also via more progressive production contexts articulated with representations of diversity in the series. This incarnation of Doctor Who has at last begun to move away from the series’ intense and typically unmarked whiteness of creatives or narratives, and towards episodes written by people of colour as well as focusing on topics such as racial segregation in the US and the historical Partition of India and Pakistan.

A related term of abuse levelled by sections of conservative or reactionary fandom is that the show has become too ‘PC’ or politically correct under Chibnall’s guidance. Like ‘SJW’, this also operates as a form of everyday othering, and, although ‘PC’ is difficult to define conclusively, as Geoffrey Hughes has argued in Political Correctness: A History of Semantics and Culture, it involves ‘discouraging judgmental attitudes and outlawing demeaning language. In this process a new framework of values and morality has arisen’, which opponents of PC characterize as proscriptive and/or as a form of censorship (2010: 58–59). ‘PC’ is therefore characterized by those othering it as an imposition – a restrictive or reorienting exercise of symbolic power which supposedly limits the free expression of (usually) right-wing common sense and ideology. Once more, this era of Doctor Who finds itself being interpreted within an intensely politicized and divisive reception context of ‘fractured’ fandom. Thus the issue is not simply one of whether or not Who has suddenly become more textually political than ever before (McKee, 2004) – spoiler: it hasn’t! – but rather that its fan interpretative communities have arguably become more likely to read the programme politically (via popular feminism or popular misogyny) in the contemporary ‘moment’ of Chris Chibnall’s creative oversight and Jodie Whittaker’s innovative casting. The new dawn here is not only a positive one to be textually celebrated, however, and, as such, it is vital to take a critical approach to the emergent and reactionary cultural politics of sections of fandom, including those who seek to problematically claim that ‘SJW’ and ‘PC’ are merely apolitical, everyday terminologies.

Doctor Who – New Dawn therefore agrees with official, paratextual publicity that ‘It’s About Time’. It is about time in a whole series of intersecting ways: textually, industrially, interpretively, and in terms of social media practices, popular feminism and everyday sexism, as well as via cultural politics of diversity and inclusion. This latest incarnation of Doctor Who may well have become readable as a newly inclusive brand, but of course there are still hegemonic limits to projected inclusivity, and the programme brand remains, as Banet-Weiser notes following the cultural studies’ theorist Stuart Hall, very much the terrain of pop-cultural (and fan-generated-content) struggle.

So, although this edited collection remains strongly cognisant of Paul Booth’s (2014) warning against any overly strict periodization of Doctor Who, where the division into ‘eras’ threatens to be (problematically) treated merely as part of the ontology or essence of Who, in a series of ways the work gathered together here argues for the analytical and heuristic importance, as well as the cultural-political and contextualist significance, of treating series 11 and 12 – as per the book’s subtitle – as part of ‘the Jodie Whittaker era’. Of course, this could also be the ‘Chris Chibnall era’ – or the combined ‘Chibnall/Whittaker era’ to take in both on-screen and off-screen changes – but in our overall subtitle we both simplified and, deliberately, consciously opted for the feminized gendering of this ‘moment’ of the series.

Quantities and qualities: evaluating the Chibnall/Whittaker era

One issue that arises in relation to the new dawn of Doctor Who and concomitant changes is the impact this might have had, if any, on the show’s audience ratings. Putting aside the negative reactions in some quarters of social media and those fans who were vocal in saying they were no longer watching, have the qualitatively changed aspects of the series under Chris Chibnall’s production had a quantitative impact? This is especially important in the context of regendering a long-established brand, of course, though other factors may also be important in terms of changing audience ratings. Chibnall has stated that ‘series 11 was about recruitment to Doctor Who’ (Hearn, 2019: 13), and the audience figures for early episodes of series 11 (see Figure 0.1) suggest that Chibnall very much succeeded in his stated aim of ‘taking a big leap by casting the first female Doctor, and we had to make everyone want to come and have a look’ (ibid.: 13–14).

At 10.96 million viewers including iPlayer views in the week of first transmission, the audience for ‘The Woman Who Fell to Earth’ means this episode had the largest audience of any series premiere and the largest of any episode since ‘The Time of the Doctor’ in 2013. This might well be indicative of the curiosity value of a female Doctor. However, has this worked in the longer term? The audience figures across series 11 and 12 show a downward trend, with only episodes towards the end of series 11, the new year special and the start of series 12, and then ‘Fugitive of the Judoon’, interrupting an overall decline. It might be hypothesized from this that some of the ‘new recruits’ did not continue to watch the ongoing series, or that pre-existing viewers were lost. Without further research, however, it cannot be deduced what reasons there might be for this, and, while personal taste may be an element, many other factors could also be involved.

0.1 Audience figures for series 11 to 12

It could also be noted that television audiences for mainstream channels in general are falling amongst some demographics, alongside a rise in streaming services and other competing forms of entertainment, and that a fall in the Doctor Who audience is therefore likely to be part of a general decline in mainstream television viewing. However, the audience share (see Figure 0.2) for Doctor Who also declined during series 11 and 12, suggesting that the programme is losing more viewers relative to other programmes in the same time slot (although it is not clear from the audience figures whether this loss is compensated for by increases in viewers who are watching outside the week of broadcast via streaming services or upon the release of DVD and Blu-ray box sets). Whilst this is not a question that can be definitively answered without further audience data or research, it does raise the question of whether the series currently faces some problems retaining viewers amongst segments of its audience at least (and, unhelpfully, BARB figures do not include demographic or psychographic data). Factors such as the move to the Sunday evening schedule, the lack of returning (and thus familiar) monsters or villains in series 11 (amplified by the entirely new main cast), and the relative scarcity of pre-publicity may all have had an impact.

A niche programme brand attracting a smaller, but highly appreciative, audience is not necessarily a problem, of course. However, the audience appreciation index (see Figure 0.3) also indicates that Chibnall’s Doctor Who is not being received as well as the series has been in previous years. Only three episodes in series 11 – ‘The Woman Who Fell to Earth’, ‘Rosa’, and ‘Arachnids in the UK’ – had an appreciation index above the average across all BBC programmes (an AI of 82), and these were all near the beginning of the run. Subsequently, only one episode after this – series 12’s ‘Fugitive of the Judoon’ – achieved an above-average rating. All four episodes rated only 1 point higher than the AI average, at 83. Overall, these AIs – averaging 81 – are significantly lower than in previous years of Doctor Who: the average AI for Peter Capaldi’s episodes was 83, itself a fall from 86 for the Matt Smith episodes. The indication is that aspects of Chibnall’s production – even with the embrace of diversity on-screen and behind the camera, and the ‘big leap’ forward with the series that this represents – are not sustaining or increasing viewer enjoyment (which had already been falling off prior to Chibnall’s appointment as showrunner). It can only be concluded that Chibnall’s attempts to refresh the rebooted series after 15 years have not been entirely successful, at least if measured in terms of audience ratings.

0.2 Audience share for series 11 to 12

0.3 Audience Appreciation Index (AI) for series 11 to 12

There are other ways of evaluating success, however. Another of the more notable changes made in the latest ‘era’ has been series 12’s revisionist approach to canon. And as Lance Parkin has observed, canon – the agreed-upon events, histories, and backstories that officially exist in franchise texts – offers a way for fans to manage the proliferating texts of Who, deciding or debating what should count as fandom’s shared culture:

The key to understanding the importance of ‘canon’ to a Doctor Who fan is that it represents investment. Fans spend a great deal of time and money on Doctor Who … For this level of commitment to work, they have to know the stories matter. Fans want the writers to demonstrate at least some of the care and attention to detail that they possess. For the emotional, time, and financial investment of being a Doctor Who fan to pay off, they have to contribute to and inform, in some way, the wider Doctor Who universe. They – the stories and the fans – have to matter. (Parkin, 2007: 259)

This is a curiously neoliberal approach, though, in which fandom seems to be about securing a decent ‘return on investment’. It also concludes, rather strikingly, by blurring together or aligning canon and fandom – contra Parkin, then, to instead indicate that canon is somehow unimportant is seemingly to devalue fandom at one and the same time. This, perhaps, is the trap that series 12 partly fell into when it presented a radically new origin story for the Doctor in ‘The Timeless Children’. Established canon wasn’t ignored or carelessly trodden over, though; if anything, it was very carefully reworked with a showrunner-fan’s eye for detail that even involved incorporating a brief sequence from ‘The Brain of Morbius’, originally broadcast in 1976. Yet by rewriting the Doctor as a non-Time Lord who was central to granting the power of regeneration – in effect, extending her ‘fam’ to all Time Lords ever – ‘The Timeless Children’ sparked complaints and agitation in some quarters of long-term fandom. Revising canon in such a marked way, regardless of the new story possibilities it opened up, seemed for some fans to amount to a blatant disregard for their long-accumulated fan cultural capital or fan knowledge. This situation moves perilously close to Paul Cornell’s argument that, in fact, canon has become about claims to authority that can never truly exist, given that Doctor Who’s canon has no ultimate Papal writ. Or, worse still, that fans’ defence of well-established canon can sometimes become a way of ‘bullying people’ (Cornell, 2007). This is strong stuff, but Cornell does accurately link canon debates with performances of (claimed) fan-cultural authority; protecting one’s ‘investment’, in Parkin’s terms, means treating canon as exclusionary, i.e. certain fans behave as if their views are more important purely because they have invested time, money, and emotion in amassing knowledge about the details of the (frequently shifting) Whoniverse. In effect, these audiences extend the same equation that Parkin sets out – a rewriting of canon is perceived as a devaluation not merely of fans’ investments but as some kind of cultural or symbolic attack on those fans.

Rather than framing canon revision as some fannish entry into a culture war (canon war?), we would argue that Chibnall’s approaches to canon in series 11 and 12 are, in fact, entirely of a piece. Ignoring details of canon (old monsters, etc.) in order to make series 11 a jumping-on point for new audiences means rendering canon accessible rather than exclusionary (a decision that’s very similar in spirit to Russell T Davies’s minimalist and emotive approach via the Time War back in 2005). And reworking canon in series 12 to open up many new mysteries and questions (what race does the Doctor belong to? just how many pre-Hartnell Doctors were there, and what are they up to, scattered through the timelines?) makes canon less a matter of learning Doctor Who lore through long hours of commitment, and more about playing with possibilities in the show’s present. That is, if contemporary Doctor Who’s cultural moment and context can be characterized as one of ‘brand inclusivity’, as we’ve suggested, then this is not only a matter of diversity of representation and production personnel. Twisting ‘canon’ into a newly open form also makes it more inclusive, more accessible, and less about fan hierarchies or claimed authorities: the new fan who joined with series 11 knows substantively as much about the Doctor’s current origin story as the lifelong fan who started watching back in 1963, meaning that performances of ‘new fandom’ and (allegedly) ‘true fandom’ can potentially collapse together in novel ways. Ignoring ‘fanwank’ levels of continuity in series 11, and then promptly invoking them in series 12 in order to significantly rewrite Gallifrey’s past, both suggest that Doctor Who should be mindfully loved and appreciated in the moment (and arguably, Chibnall’s approach to spoiler control is part of the same coherent strategy) rather than treated, via extensive fan knowledge or fan cultural capital, as a neoliberal fan’s ‘return on investment’.

It could be suggested that, by implying a coherent brand management strategy, we are falling prey to a version of the ‘intentional fallacy’. This has its roots in literary theory, addressing the danger that critics might falsely attribute intentions to an author when all they have to go on are the attributes of the text itself. To avoid the fallacy is to avoid speculating over (or making pronouncements upon) what the author or showrunner ‘really meant’. Previous scholarship on Doctor Who has occasionally run into this issue; reviewing work by James Chapman and Kim Newman, for instance, Mark Broughton (2008: 209) argues that ‘the intentional fallacy springs to mind’ when analysis of Doctor Who ‘does not … register the extent to which the finished programme [has actually] realised the ideas put forward’ during planning, production, and brand management. Indeed, concepts of intention recur across this volume – Dene October discusses ‘intentional spectacle’ in Chapter 3, while in Chapter 5 Lorna Jowett analyses the current show’s ‘statement of intent’ in terms of how it represents sexualities. However, like our examination of Doctor Who’s current historical ‘moment’ here, these discussions don’t replay the ‘intentional fallacy’ of merely inferring authorial intent from a complex aesthetic text. All are grounded in paratextual evidence (industry interviews for commercial fan magazines; publicity and promotion; previously published analyses and so on), but more importantly, all accept and indeed prioritize exploring the gaps between paratextually mediated ‘intent’ (which cannot always be accepted at face value) and textual complexities. Chapter 3 considers how personalized audience responses to Doctor Who’s current filming style can reinflect its bids for spectacle, for example, and Chapter 5 refuses to accept progressive statements of intent in order to assess the problematic limits to Doctor Who’s representations of sexuality. Our discussion of Who as an inclusive brand should similarly not be seen as making a strong or pure claim for showrunner intent – it is rather that this interpretation offers one way of articulating a range of textual qualities which may otherwise seem disconnected or contingent, e.g. representations of diversity and approaches to canon.

A further challenge to any ‘intentional’ assumption lies in the fact that a long-running franchise such as Doctor Who can attain analytically discernible ‘historical moments’ of its own only through an array of dialogues with other aspects of prevailing cultural contexts. Thus, the casting of a white female Doctor and the narrative introduction of a female Doctor-of-colour have both intersected with the cultural politics of the #MeToo Era and the Black Lives Matter movement, as we’ll now consider.

Moments and movements: framing the Chibnall/Whittaker era

#MeToo represents one dramatic instance of ‘popular feminism’ (Banet-Weiser, 2018: 1) seeking to expose and contest the everyday misogyny, harassment, and abuse that have been ingrained in patriarchal power structures. However, as Karen Boyle argues, ‘popular feminism can be … ambivalent for a wider feminist politics, …because of the emphasis on visibility over action. Popular feminism in this iteration is fundamentally about being seen—as a feminist, supporting feminist issues – rather