Doctor Who (31 page)

The Woman Doctor

In the classic program, we met women Time Lords (which seemed to be the preferred term over the not as often spoken “Time Ladies”), so clearly Gallifrey had distinct genders. The differences between them have led to some speculation. As mentioned earlier, three different
Doctor Who
TV stories indicated that female Time Lords had greater natural control over regeneration than males, enough to determine the form of their next bodies. But many fans continue to ask: Can Time Lords regenerate into a different gender altogether?

Sydney Newman certainly thought so and suggested to the BBC that the Doctor become a woman as early as 1987. When Tom Baker's departure was approaching in 1981, he remarked during an interview that viewers shouldn't assume the Fifth Doctor had to be a man. Then producer John Nathan-Turner didn't mind the idea and encouraged such speculation. Since then, every subsequent announcement that the lead of
Doctor Who
would be recast has been quickly followed by news media asking if the next Doctor would be a she. When David Tennant was ending his tenure, there were even rumors that the next Doctor would be Catherine Tate or Billie Piper, despite both having played popular companions.

Steven Moffat played with the idea of a gender change when the newly regenerated Eleventh Doctor, on feeling his hair length, immediately wondered if he had become a woman. Like some Whovians, Neil Gaiman saw no reason that a Time Lord couldn't alter his or her gender (at least, under the right circumstances) and made it official in his 2011 episode “The Doctor's Wife” when the Doctor remarks how a Time Lord called the Corsair had been a woman on multiple occasions.

Of course, not everyone thinks that, even if a possibility, it should be done. Mark Campbell, author of
Dimensions in Time and Space,
says, “It's sort of like saying you can change James Bond or Sherlock Holmes into a woman. I don't think it's particularly necessary.” In a Q&A feature on the BBC America website, Peter Davison said:

 

I've never quite liked the idea of a female Doctor. I think they've found a perfect situation now where they have the slightly faulted Doctor with all his mad genius, and you have the strong woman as the companion. I think that works very well. If you reversed it, it would be difficult because you'd have the woman as the mad genius, but is she vulnerable? And then you just have a strong man as the companion. And somehow that doesn't work well to me.

 

But not everyone agrees. When I asked actor Peter Purves, who had played Steven Taylor opposite William Hartnell, about it, he remarked, “What would be so wrong with having a woman in the role? It's already an alien who changes shape and has a brain we can't really understand. Just as long as she still acts like the Doctor.”

Sylvester McCoy told me, “I wonder sometimes if
Doctor Who
would lose some fans with a woman in the role. But we need more equality among the sexes because it isn't there yet. We don't give women enough credit. Women can be heroic in science fiction and can be intelligent, complex characters, of course. If the Doctor can change from looking like Colin Baker to looking like me and change yet again so he looks like the not-as-handsome Paul McGann, then turning into a woman doesn't seem much stranger. It'd be interesting, and they should try it.”

In an interview for this book, Big Finish director and actor Lisa Bowerman said, “I don't think there's a good reason the Doctor can't be a woman. I don't think we should fixate on it, either. We shouldn't cast someone just to have a woman Doctor or a black Doctor or an Asian Doctor. If it works well dramatically and it's the right person, then, yes, why not cast that person? If it's a woman that time, cast a woman. You'd probably lose half of fandom, as people can be very loyal to their ideas, but you have to have confidence in your conviction. If you have something appear on television, in the story, then that legitimizes it. The Doctor can be anything except—and I don't mean this to be offensive—anything other than British in character, atmosphere, and sensibility.”

At the Armageddon Convention in New Zealand in 2010, Paul McGann was asked if the Doctor could be a woman and he said, “I'd watch it. . . . Tilda Swinton as
Doctor Who,
can you imagine that? Tell me you wouldn't watch that. You would; you know you would.”

21

Something Borrowed, Something New

“You are not of this world.”

“No, but I've put a lot of work into it.”

—An Atraxi and the Eleventh Doctor, from “The Eleventh Hour” (2010)

 

It's an interesting experience, sitting across from a Time Lord.

Though I've interviewed others who've played the Doctor, speaking with Matt Smith is a different experience altogether. When we met, the Doctor was not a role he'd left behind but one he was still exploring—and loving every minute of it.

Smith grew up in Northampton, England, an avid sports fan who intended to play soccer professionally. After a back injury left him with spondylosis, a teacher suggested he try his hand at drama. He studied at the National Youth Theatre before taking up a stage career in London. During this time, he acted alongside Arthur Darvill, who later joined him on
Doctor Who.
He made his television debut in
The Ruby in the Smoke
in 2007, which also starred Billie Piper, and they shared the screen when he appeared on her series
Secret Diary of a Call Girl.

In 2009, Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss were putting together their new show
Sherlock,
modernizing Doyle's great detective. Moffat was also taking over
Doctor Who,
after having written (along with Gatiss) several episodes during Davies's tenure. To help move closer to some of the classic series notions of the show, Moffat wanted to cast a Doctor in his forties or even fifties: a Time Lord who was a bit aloof rather than wearing his heart on his sleeve.

During auditions for
Sherlock,
Matt Smith tried out for the part of Dr. John Watson. He didn't get a callback, but he did see Moffat again not long after when he auditioned for the role of the Eleventh Doctor. At
just twenty-six, Smith certainly didn't fit the bill of the middle-aged actor whom Moffat wanted for the part. But during our interview in San Diego, Smith reflected, “You have to go into an audition thinking you deserve this part, that you're right for it. If you don't tell yourself that, they're certainly not going to believe it, either. What have you got to lose?”

Smith's performance surprised and impressed all involved. Moffat and the production team felt that the actor, despite his youth, delivered the sense of being an older Doctor that they were seeking. In
Doctor Who Confidential,
Moffat explained, “We got all these wonderful actors in deadly secrecy . . . to stand there and pretend to be the Doctor for a while. . . . He was just spot-on, right from the beginning. . . . The way he said the lines, the way he looked, his hair, you just thought,
Oh, oh, that's him.
Problem is, it's the first day. . . . We thought we had to keep going and keep looking. . . . In the end, it was Matt.”

So, at age twenty-six, Smith became the youngest man cast in the role. The announcement went out on January 3, 2009, on
Doctor Who Confidential,
soon after the broadcast of David Tennant's special “The Next Doctor,” which starred David Morrissey as a man who had suffered amnesia and now believed that he was the Doctor. The Tenth Doctor couldn't be sure at first if this was a confused man or his future incarnation. Smith's casting was kept secret for all the usual reasons but also in part so that viewers could wonder (at least, at first) whether David Morrissey's character was actually intended to be the Eleventh Doctor. By the end of the special, after it's clear this isn't the case, there was no reason to keep it quiet any longer.

Matt Smith at Comic-Con 2011

“I spent days pacing around, sitting down, then standing up again, pace some more, smiling and thinking,
I'm the Doctor now!
I didn't watch
Doctor Who
—I was a bit too young to have really caught the classic stuff and with the new
show I was in my twenties and often out or acting on Saturday nights—but you know it, of course, it's everywhere, and people are chatting about it on talk shows, and the Doctor seriously is an iconic part of our culture, like Holmes and Robin Hood. My father would talk about Tom Baker. Everyone in my family had their own Doctors and references. I had to tell my dad about the casting. I was going mad just sitting with my friends and not telling them I was the Doctor. He laughed and was very excited and proud of it all.”

Following the announcement, there was expected criticism that Smith was too young to play such an ancient being with any sense of gravitas. In an interview for this book at Comic-Con 2011, Matt Smith said with a laugh, “When I first came, people said, ‘Well, he's too young.' But actually, tell me someone who isn't too young to play a nine-hundred-plus-year-old Time Lord! I think that it's interesting to have someone young play someone old.”

It's certainly interesting for us on the other side of the screen that an actor not deeply familiar with the program, modern or classic, created a version of the hero that very much recalled the classic series ideal: a strange, scatterbrained uncle or grandfather who wants to go on adventures your parents would think were too dangerous.

Hearing this appraisal, Smith smiles. “Yes! That's kind of what I want the Doctor to be, actually: your crazy, strange uncle. The Doctor should be funny, mad, brilliant, ridiculous. I think at the core what he reaches for is humanity. I think the one thing he can never be is human. He finds it peculiar that they fall in love and get married and have Christmas dinner. . . . He's a maverick, he's an alien, and his addiction is to time travel and running and saving the world. We all have our own opinion on the Doctor, and that's what's sort of wonderful. He's never one thing. Ever.”

Smith did get around to catching up on the show, watching the classic series DVDs as well as the modern ones. He cites “Tomb of the Cybermen” as his favorite TV story of the classic era, and his Doctor's outfit even resembles Troughton's with bow tie and suspenders. As Tennant evoked the idea of being a professional student, Smith in his turn looked more like a professor, wearing a tweed sport coat with patches on the elbows. The
Doctor went from geek chic to nerdy and proud. The bow tie made sense after his first adventure, when a traditional necktie left him vulnerable to being trapped in a car door by companion Amy Pond.

Smith finally appeared as the Eleventh Doctor in the last scene of “The End of Time” on New Year's Day in 2010 (by which point he was twenty-seven years old). After checking out his new body, the Doctor realizes that his ship is crashing and greets the event with gleeful anticipation, hurtling happily toward the next stage of his life and shouting “Geronimo!”

As time went on, much of the criticism toward Smith faded away, replaced by praise that the young actor actually seemed older than several previous incarnations. At WonderCon 2011 in San Francisco, a
Doctor Who
panel included writer Neil Gaiman, comedian/host Chris Hardwick, and actor Mark Shepard, who all discussed Smith's portrayal of the Doctor.

Shepard grew up watching the adventures of Pertwee and Tom Baker, the latter being his favorite incarnation. But after seeing Smith in action and filming episodes alongside him, he admitted that he now feels differently. “I gotta tell you: Matt Smith is my Doctor. . . . He carries that weight [of the character] so superbly. . . . He took me around the TARDIS and showed me how
every
button and wheel works.”

Chris Hardwick: “He manages to strike this insane counterbalance between incredible boyish curiosity but then also you sense that he's nine hundred years old inside.”

Neil Gaiman: “That's the most interesting thing about writing for Matt in some ways. He's the first of the [new series] Doctors who actually feels vastly ancient. They all had these glorious different qualities. . . . But with Matt, you actually feel his age all the way through, going all the way back. Almost for the first time since Tom Baker, the idea that the central entity and the body are two slightly different things. You
know
this is an alien. This is not someone that you know, and it's amazing.”

Former Doctor actors agreed. During an interview at Memorabilia Expo in 2012, Colin Baker remarked that Smith now rivaled Patrick Troughton as his favorite Doctor. “I think he's brilliant. He's almost my all-time favorite Doctor. . . . He's just so engaging and so real. . . . When you're playing a character that is inherently unreal, you've got to be as real as you can. He is, and I just believe every word he says.”

At Gallifrey One 2013, Sylvester McCoy lit up with excitement when asked about the Eleventh Doctor. “How about Smith? Incredible! This twelve-year-old shows up, and yet he's older than
all
of us. He's an ancient Doctor, an ancient alien, not someone raised on Earth. When I heard they were casting such a young person, I thought,
Oh, they're going into that world still, where the hero has to be young and handsome,
and I miss the fact that the Doctor is an older man, a wise man who's led an ancient life.

“But David Tennant was lovely in the role, and Matt Smith—he is astonishing! His face has so much experience in it, and his performance is just excellent in how you feel how ancient he is. Somehow he's got bits of Patrick Troughton in him and bits of Tom Baker. You can believe that his Doctor remembers all that, that he doesn't just remember his life as David Tennant, he remembers and feels the weight of being Patrick and Tom and Colin and
me
! I'm such a fan.”

A Family Affair

In the second season episode “The Girl in the Fireplace,” the Tenth Doctor meets a girl and then visits her again as an adult, with her recalling him as an imaginary friend. The fifth season premiere “The Eleventh Hour” uses the same idea, setting up the year to have a fairy tale atmosphere. The young Amelia Pond meets the strange Doctor who wears raggedy clothes and lives in a time machine that has a swimming pool and a library. No one believes her, of course, and she grows up to become Amy Pond (played by Karen Gillan), a girl with no patience for fairy tales. But then the Doctor returns, and she realizes, at first with fear, that the universe is indeed as large, dangerous, and exciting as she believed as a child.

Amy's character herself was a message to the audience. Many parents and older viewers enjoyed the classic series but also took it with a grain of salt and didn't necessarily wish to engage in a similar way with the modern program.

Amy's story is a response to people who say this, either seriously or with tongue in cheek, arguing that adults can enjoy silly, children's stories, and that one shouldn't forget to dream because you're never too old to see something impossible and venture off into strange new worlds. Just as Rose
had been introduced alongside her on-again, off-again boyfriend, Mickey, Amy was introduced with Rory Williams (played by Arthur Darvill). But Rory was established as a much more serious love interest—even if Amy was reluctant to admit it at first—and by the end of their debut episode, the two were engaged.

Karen Gillan earned her acting degree at the Italia Conti Academy of Theatre Arts in London. Working as a model first, she appeared at London Fashion Week 2007, later returning to acting, making several television appearances and becoming known for comedic roles. Gillan appeared as a soothsayer in the 2008 David Tennant episode “The Fires of Pompeii,” and by sheer coincidence Gillan's cousin Caitlin Blackwood landed the role of seven-year-old Amy Pond in “The Eleventh Hour.” (Gillan and Blackwood didn't know they were related until they met through the program.)

Arthur Darvill (Rory Williams) and Lisa Bowerman (Bernice Summerfield)

Photograph courtesy of Big Finish Productions

Arthur Darvill trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and in 2007 received high praise for his performance in the Vaudeville Theatre production of
Swimming with Sharks,
starring alongside Matt Smith, Helen Baxendale, and Christian Slater. His
Doctor Who
character, Rory Williams, a nurse, was quite content to spend the rest of his life in the fictional town of Leadworth rather than run away in a time traveling police box. (The
Doctor Who
reference guides indicate that Rory chose medicine as his profession because of Amy's strange interest in the “Raggedy Doctor” who she claimed had visited her as a child.)