I was genuinely excited for Chibnall and Whitaker before they started.
Broadchurch was an excellent drama, with some amazing performances and dialogue, and with David Tennant as the lead, you'd have assumed Chibnall would have learnt something about Who from him.
Whitaker meanwhile has been great in everything else I've seen her in, she's an actress that can portray deeply soulful emotion and pain better than most.
And maybe that's why they don't work. Drama and pain is all they had.
Put aside the cringey, preachy, outdated, far left politics, and the show is just dour now. Doctor Who is meant to be fun and optimistic. It has darkness, and horror, but those are moments, regular little asides that work because they contrast with the levity and hopefulness surrounding them.
The moment I knew something was off was in their first episode, where the Doctor is running, and stops, suddenly looking a bit uncomfortable, and a companion asks her if she's ok.
What I expected was a joke, because it's Doctor Who and they were clearly setting something up there. Instead she dismissed the concern as if it was weird and stated she was fine, then carried on as usual.
The OBVIOUS thing to have there was a joke about her new body. Some thing like 'she needs a sports bra', 'she regrets making all her female companions run without making sure they had sports bras', 'this was so much easier when she was full of testosterone', 'her hips are wider and its throwing off her running'...
It just needed something, some pithy lighthearted acknowledgement that the Doctor, someone who has always been a very masculine character underneath all the eccentricities and distaste for violence, was now a woman, and everything would be different. But it's never been acknowledged, and that scene in particular can only exist to deliberately stick two fingers up to the idea that there's any differences because why else would it be filmed? Why show a moment of weakness, draw attention to it, then immediately dismiss it and never follow it up?
And we have had nothing since that has done anything with the fact the Doctor is a woman now either. Well, apart from portray men as sexist pigs occasionally.
The show seems almost begrudging of having to write the Doctor as a woman quite frankly. It's a burden to bear or it's completely ignored entirely, whereas I was expecting, hoping, that it was going to be a brilliant, fun and funny new experience for a character that has always been so very male before but desperately seeks out new experiences because he's pretty much a bored god.
I mean it's not like they didn't nail it before with Missy, so why does the Doctor get shafted?
It's the new series in a nutshell really. The creators aren't having fun, they don't see the world or the future as anything to be excited by or hopeful about. Everything is just the oppressors and the oppressed, constantly vying to be the one fucking everyone else over, so no wonder they only ever make fiction that's a bloody misery to sit through.
cosmicbook.news
. Such good memories 
