The Seeds of Gay Doom (IV. The Parting of the Cheeks)

The tenures of Steven Moffat and Chris Chibnall

(Note: this essay is part of a series.)

Here are the episode ratings (in millions) throughout Russell T Davies’ first tenure:

Ratings were consistently very good, with the later specials being incredibly popular. When he left the show in 2010, it was on a very strong footing, wildly successful and on a commercial, critical and creative high.

The reins now went to Steven Moffat, who had written some of the most successful episodes so far and was clearly a man of grand vision.

Moffat is a very different personality from Davies. Heterosexual and a family man, he seems more well-adjusted, more conventional, less ideological, and blissfully free of any chips on his shoulder. He seems a genuinely happy man, whereas I suspect that Davies is plagued with bouts of depression and insecurity (counterbalanced by “happiness” and egomania).

Moffat is much more at ease with himself. This is shown by one key decision: making the Doctor once again eccentric and alien in his behaviour. Moffat cared about the show being popular, but not so much that he would have the Doctor be an “everyman” character. Conversely, I believe Davies was compelled in that decision not just by commercial factors but by a personal desire for social acceptance, borne of being a social outcast in his youth in 1970s Wales. Moffat had no such insecurities, so he could freely make the Doctor eccentric and alien again. He cast Matt Smith, an actor probably better-suited to the role than any of the others cast in the revival. He was ideal, encompassing all of the Doctor’s classic traits.

Moffat is also less political in life than Davies, yet much better at handling politics in drama. He is more male-minded, more nerdy, and clearly a fan of open-ended cogitation. His scripts have elements of philosophy whereas Davies’ have grand emotional arcs. Davies is adept with psychology and emotion, whereas Moffat is lacklustre in this area. But, as a nerd, he clearly loves science-fiction whereas for Davies it just provides pretty backdrops for human stories. Moffat’s scripts tend to be action-oriented, suspenseful, clever, witty, and technically coherent. Unlike Davies, he has no grudge against mainstream society. He is, by all appearances, a happy heterosexual family man.

Therefore, you might assume he would be less committed to political correctness than Davies. Not so. His tenure was more forthright in this regard. (During its span, the term “PC” would be replaced by “woke”.) Perhaps it is precisely because he sticks to tradition in his personal life; unlike the fanatically homosexual Davies, he needs to prove his progressive credentials, his commitment to the orthodoxy.

But I can see some other explanations.

Despite his love of science-fiction, Moffat is a normie, and the normie has an increased need, not to earn acceptance (he already has it) but to “go along to get along”. Outsiders like Davies direct and demand change, eventually achieving consensus; conformists like Moffat might not understand the consensus but they know it is the consensus and that it must be followed - especially in an arena like the mainstream media where the rewards for following are many, and the punishments for straying are swift and, in this day and age, total.

Another possible explanation is more sinister. While Moffat is well-balanced, I believe he has a dominatrix fetish, a desire to be dominated and belittled by women. It sounds ridiculous but his tenure on Doctor Who provides ample evidence. Before he did anything else in the way of wokery, he increased the show’s feminist element. This involved having the Doctor demeaned, berated and outshone by numerous annoying women (River Song, Amy, Clara, Missy). The dynamic was mirrored in husband-and-wife companions Rory and Amy: he was weak and subservient to her, and she treated him with ingratitude and contempt.

Even the way Rory and Amy were filmed made him seem weak and submissive to her. He is usually farther from the camera than she is, he is often looking at her, she almost never looks at him.

But that was mostly as far as woke went during the first half of Moffat’s tenure, the Matt Smith era (2010-14). Smith was an excellent choice to play the Doctor, and Moffat kept the writing quality high. As a result, ratings remained almost the same as during his predecessor’s heyday:

This era peaked in November 2013 with the 50th anniversary special, which “broke viewing records around the world after being aired in 94 countries simultaneously”, “the largest ever simulcast of a TV drama”. And it was a genuinely excellent episode, an exciting and satisfying story and a fitting celebration of the show’s 50-year legacy. The script was clever, inventive, coherent, fun, and had a sound moral core. It was a brilliant achievement by Steven Moffat.

Then began the decline.

Matt Smith was replaced as the Doctor by Peter Capaldi (2014-17), and with this change, Moffat, whether voluntarily or due to pressure, began ramping up the explicit wokery.

The feminism was intensified, with constant undermining of masculinity (if a parent wanted to cripple their son’s self-image, they could raise him on these years of Doctor Who).

Gay content, especially lesbianism, was also cranked up.

Moffat indulged his fetish for domineering women with the character of Madame Vastra, a reptile lesbian who is “married” (even though she lives in the Victorian era) to a young White woman, Jenny. One episode shows Vastra snogging Jenny. Moffat covered his tracks by having an in-story “justification” for this: they are underwater and Jenny is running out of oxygen, but Vastra is able to store oxygen in her reptile lungs and therefore can save Jenny with a snog. (Grown-ups wrote this…) This angered some fans, who resurrected the “gay agenda” claim but this time about Moffat who is straight. Six people complained to Ofcom, but Ofcom naturally chose not to investigate. Meantime, when exporting the episode to Asia, BBC Worldwide cut out the lesbian snog in order to abide by local broadcasting standards. Sheepishly explaining this decision to Western media, they said the “brief edit” didn’t detract from the storyline. Well, indeed...

Moffat also introduced Bill Potts, the first gay (lesbian) companion, played by Pearl Mackie. And here we get a surprising chance to show why this content is bad for children. Mackie recently disclosed that playing Bill made her realise she herself is bisexual:

When I played her, in my head I wasn’t a queer person. But the confidence Bill had really helped me to look at myself and realise there were some parallels there. Sitting with her and all the joy that she has brought to the LGBTQIA+ community and the Black community particularly allowed me to realise that some of the feelings I had when I was younger that I pushed aside were real.

Mackie was 29 when she played the part. She got all the way to 29 without making this all-important realisation about herself. Having made it, she is now in a lesbian marriage.

If an adult woman can be swayed like this, what about children and adolescents? How many women, who would otherwise have “pushed aside” those feelings and now be married, heterosexual mothers, are instead “lesbians”, having been swayed by the gay content on-screen just as Mackie was?

This is exactly the “paranoia” and “fearmongering” for which conservatives have been mocked for decades, yet demonstrably it is well-founded. Indeed, the Left will celebrate the same effect, just in veiled language that ignores the personal and societal implications of encouraging people down this path.

But perhaps Moffat’s most egregious wokery was in the area of race. This really ramped up with season 9 (2015). The change was visible from its first episode, The Magician’s Apprentice. Many of the extras, and almost all actors unique to the episode, are non-white.

The two actors playing Kaled soldiers (an alien species)

In the same episode, the extras of medieval England:

Of 11 extras, at least 5 are non-white

Let us compare a similar shot from the Davies era:

A crowd shot in The Shakespeare Code (2007), set in London in 1599. The companion was Black, but nobody was pretending that Elizabethan England was multi-racial.

And now another one from 2015:

A behind-the-scenes photo from The Woman Who Lived (2015), set in 1651. At least nine non-white extras.

Things were even worse by Season 11:

A crowd shot in Thin Ice (2017), set in London in 1814. Of thirteen extras, one is Chinese, one is Indian and three are Black. Only eight are White. Even London today is not this Black!

Another shot from Thin Ice. Of eight extras visible here, five are Black. That is 62% Black. London today is only 15.6% Black!

In 2016, Moffat voiced a proud intention to blackwash history:

We’ve kind of got to tell a lie. We’ll go back into history and there will be Black people where, historically, there wouldn’t have been, and we won’t dwell on that. We’ll say, “to hell with it, this is the imaginary, better version of the world. By believing in it, we’ll summon it forth”.

There he admits that he is telling “a lie”, albeit one that he considers “noble”. Speaking to adults, he admits to blackwashing history. However, when speaking to children in the episode Thin Ice, he has the infamous line “history is a whitewash” - the very opposite statement. Thus, he asserts that his self-admitted lie is “the truth”, and that the actual truth is “a whitewash”. This works, and it demonstrates the hypocrisy of the normie liberal: lying, then admitting he lied, then asserting that the lie is the truth and that the old truth was a lie all along. It boggles the mind! But such is the fungibility of “belief” in a conformist man living in a time of universal deceit; he will knowingly lie and mis-lead children in order to protect his social status.

For the same reason, he will also dishonestly demonise White British men, throwing his own kind under the bus, such as in this ludicrous scene he wrote for another programme.

Speaking of ludicrous, another thing Moffat did was maintain, and build upon, Davies’ disrespect for history. Here for example is a (narratively pointless) scene from The Magician’s Apprentice (2015), where the Doctor entertains a crowd of medieval peasants using a military tank and an electric guitar while wearing sunglasses and chewing gum:

Well, the budget isn’t going to spend itself…

One of the characters does say that this is “anachronistic”, but acknowledging it doesn’t make it any better. Moffat didn’t have to do any of this. Having the Doctor behave like an aged rock star is typical Boomer indulgence, preposterous but not harmful. However, having him do it in medieval England is grossly irresponsible as a writer. When the show is this cavalier about place and setting… how can anyone get invested in it? And why should they?

Moffat also laid the groundwork for turning the Doctor into a woman, by having two other Time Lords do so. One of them, the Master, regenerated into a female body and went by the name “Missy”. In my opinion, this “re-characterisation” of the Master actually worked very well, but key to this is that it is not the show’s main character. Being an arch villain, the Master is also not a character that any child would be identifying with or “rooting for”. Though it was ultimately subversive in that it established that Time Lords can change sex (thus removing any fans’ objection to the Doctor later doing so), I think Moffat’s primary motivation might have been his own fetish for domineering, contemptuous women. Either way, I think it worked well.

However, the same cannot be said for the many other woke things he did.

Moffat’s tenure (2010-2017):

• Clara: “The Universe is full of testosterone. Trust me, it’s unbearable.”

• River Song: “What’s that face? Are you thinking?! Stop it, you’re a man, it looks weird!”

• military organisation UNIT depicted as very female

• the 12th Doctor berates the 1st Doctor for sexist attitudes

• River Song constantly belittles the Doctor. It is honestly difficult to see that she has any admiration for him at all

• the Master: “Is the future going to be all girl?”
  the Doctor: “We can only hope.”

• the Doctor: “We [Time Lords] are the most civilised civilisation in the Universe. We’re billions of years beyond your petty human obsession with gender and its associated stereotypes.”

• a White male Time Lord regenerates into a Black female and promptly says that men are crippled by ego

• Bill Potts is mixed-race and lesbian

• inter-racial lesbian relationship between Bill and a White woman

• inter-species lesbian relationship between Madame Vastra and Jenny (with snogging and a clear allusion to cunnilingus)

• Clara is bisexual

• River Song is bisexual

• male Canton Everett Delaware is fired from the FBI in 1969 for wanting to marry a Black man

• “history is a whitewash”

• aristocratic racist is punched in the face by the Doctor, for being racist

• Clara’s boyfriend is Black

• a future queen of Britain is half black, half Jewish

• 1814 London depicted as multi-racial

• Elizabethan England depicted as multi-racial

• medieval England depicted as multi-racial

• in episode Flatline, a right-wing character is vilified even though his “bigotry” has been completely vindicated while the open-mindedness of other characters has got them killed

Unsurprisingly, fans turned off in large numbers.

After remaining consistent throughout Matt Smith’s era, ratings declined steadily during Peter Capaldi’s. This loss of three million viewers tracks precisely with the wokery being ramped up.

And yet, it could get so much worse…

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After the talented but ideologically-compromised Moffat retired as showrunner in 2017, the reins went to a man with a proven record of incompetence: Chris Chibnall.

The showrunner on the abysmal Torchwood a decade before, Chibnall even personally wrote the appalling episodes Countrycide and Cyberwoman. This alone should have disqualified him from getting control of Doctor Who, but somehow it didn’t, and he promptly ran the show into the ground.

Dispelling any doubts about his stunning bravery, Chibnall announced whom he had cast as the Doctor: Jodie Whittaker, a woman. Finally it was happening, the thing sensible people had been dreading for years. Chibnall was quoted:

I don’t want the casting to be a gimmick

And yet he signed off on a specially-made trailer for “the first female Doctor” in which she literally shatters a glass ceiling.

Having expressly asked Whittaker (with whom he had worked on a previous show, Broadchurch) to audition for the role, Chibnall said:

[Casting Jodie] was the easiest decision I made in my whole career.

Whittaker later revealed that she wasn’t a fan of the show, and had only watched some of it as research during auditioning and “quickly” decided she didn’t like it, but that Chibnall insisted on casting her anyway, and then gave her ridiculous advice on how to play the character:

I watched a bit during my audition process but quickly decided it’s not for me. Chris said to me, “you’re not playing the Doctor, you’re playing the truth of the scene and the Doctor will come out of that”… so, that’s what I did.

This sort of incompetence, lack of forethought, lack of depth of thought, is quite astonishing in a man entrusted with a 60-year franchise dear to millions of people.

But that was just the start.

Chibnall’s crimes are many. I only know of them second-hand since I haven’t watched a single episode from his tenure. Doubtless there is much I haven’t heard about - all of it bad - and I am happy to remain in ignorance. Suffice it to say that Chibnall is a man of limited talent, far more limited than Davies and Moffat, but also that he had a clear determination to crank up the wokery - most obviously by turning the Doctor into a woman.

Jodie Whittaker: a woman

To my credit, when the sex-switch was announced, I (kind of) predicted what went on to happen. I surmised that turning him into a (White) woman was a step towards turning him into a Black man, which is what they really wanted to do. I also predicted that the show would last two seasons of this then get axed.

Indeed, the show lost viewers episode by episode. But this wasn’t just because people couldn’t buy into the Doctor as a woman. It was also because of bad writing, bad acting, dull characters, an annoying lead actress who was completely mis-cast, a general preachy and joyless tone, and agonising levels of wokery.

Chibnall’s tenure (2018-2022):

• the Doctor is female

• companion Ryan is Black

• companion Yasmin is Asian and bisexual

• (mutual) lesbian attraction between Yasmin and the Doctor

• a secret previous incarnation of the Doctor - female and Black

• the Master played by an Indian

• an episode about Rosa Parks, in which a racist from the future (who just happens to also be a mass murderer) tries to sabotage the US Civil Rights movement

• a man is pregnant

• King James I (1603-25) depicted as actively bisexual, attracted to a Black man

• an episode about the British partitioning of India

• a villain who is an obvious stand-in for Donald Trump and is happy to pollute the environment with toxic waste in pursuit of profit

• men generally berated

But even all this wasn’t enough for Chibnall. Wanting to do some irreversible damage, he used the climax of his second season to retcon the show’s 60-year history in a particularly egregious (and woke) manner: the Doctor started life as a Black girl refugee and regenerated into children of sundry races before eventually, after thousands of incarnations, becoming “the first Doctor”, as played by William Hartnell and familiar to us since 1963.

By the end of Chibnall’s final (and truncated) season, the ratings had halved from when he took over. This brought it on par with the much-maligned late 1980s era that had resulted in cancellation.

On his tenure ending, he said:

I don’t feel any sadness about the end approaching. It’s just: “We came in, and we did what we set out to do.”

The ratings tell a story of consistent failure:

Each of Chibnall’s seasons, most markedly his first, shows a downward curve - more viewers tuning out with almost every single episode. Everything he did turned more people away. He butchered the show almost mechanically.

These ratings are even worse in context. Note that, after the downward trajectory with Capaldi, the show enjoyed a viewing revival with Chibnall’s first season (due to the novelty of a female Doctor) but swiftly destroyed that advantage:

Gifted a ratings winner, Chibnall had murdered it - commercially (by alienating the general public and insulting its long-term fans with woke tedium) and creatively (by allowing bad scripts and trashing its established history).

Though the media were (of course) still supportive of a female Doctor, even progressive outlets had to admit that the show was now in the doldrums.

It recently emerged that, at this point, the BBC were on the verge of axing it - after two-and-a-half seasons of Chibnall and a female Doctor, almost exactly as I had predicted.

But, perhaps because Doctor Who was by now prestigial, the BBC wanted to save it.

Chibnall’s contract was about to expire so they had the challenge of finding his successor, some poor sucker who would agree to take on the disaster. Chibnall himself was conscripted to help, though I suspect that was mostly to let him feel important, while the real negotiations went on over his head.

Chibnall spoke like a man bored with swinging a wrecking ball around:

It’s taken longer than expected [to find my successor] if we’re being honest. I’ve been throwing batons at people for about a year now. And finally, someone’s picked it up.

Indeed, someone had, and it seems he was the only man in Britain who wanted the job.

Funnily enough, the creative mastermind of Babylon 5, J Michael Straczynski, said he would like the job. The BBC ignored his tweet, leaving him to attempt to make contact himself. Straczynski is a very talented man and, though American, might have been able to salvage a beloved British institution. But he raised his hand in August 2021 - too late. Secretly, the BBC had already hired their new man.

And they were giving him total free rein. He was demanding it, and they couldn’t refuse.