The Seeds of Gay Doom (VI. Spite Rabies)

The abominable first season of the "RTD2" era

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

The grand new iteration of Doctor Who had fared unimpressively with its 2023 specials. In the run-up to its Season 1 in 2024, various people associated with the show said things that damaged it even further.

Shortly before her debut in the 2023 Christmas special, new companion actress Millie Gibson had described her character’s chemistry with the gay Black Doctor played by Ncuti Gatwa:

I think her dynamic with the Doctor is very much like two girls at school gossiping. They’re very cliquey. I think the Doctor’s not had that sort of dynamic before.

Yes, because it is entirely inappropriate to the show and off-putting to its core fanbase, which is male and heterosexual.

But such fans were in for a drubbing. Like a treacherous government importing a “better” electorate, the makers of Doctor Who now searched for a new fanbase, and this involved alienating the old one.

This began in February 2024 when Peter Capaldi, a man beloved by fans, attacked a great number of them:

If you’re going to cry that the show is becoming progressive to make more people feel welcome, then you aren’t a fan. Crying that Doctor Who is woke now... is pathetic. I don’t have time to sign or take photos with those nonsense people.

We are not in the ‘60s. The Doctor and Master have now, rightfully been played by [women]. When you have people come up to you and moan about those castings, you switch off and want to just leave. Russell is going to make the show relevant for everyone.

If you don’t like that… don’t watch.

In May, with Season 1 imminent, another four people associated with the show (Davies, Gatwa, David Tennant, Jinkx Monsoon) insulted its fans. They reiterated that Doctor Who was now unabashedly woke, and that anyone who didn’t like it should get stuffed. Like Capaldi, Gatwa outright told such fans not to watch:

Don’t watch. Turn off the TV. Go and touch grass, please, for God’s sake.

Those words became infamous, as did those of Jinkx Monsoon, who went even further:

To the people who are upset about it, boohoo, cry your fucking tears. It’s not your world exclusively. We all live here, so get over yourself!

I know a lot of people might not even watch this season of Doctor Who because it’s taking such a decisively queer step... And if they don’t watch it, then who needs ‘em? I truly believe that for every fan we lose to transphobia, we’re going to have two to three more coming in because they’re excited for trans representation.

Then he upped the ante:

For every transphobic, racist, bigoted Doctor Who fan that we lose this season, there are going be three to five new fans who are coming in for the representation. So to those fans - who are not fans - I say, “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”

Gatwa also moaned about “White mediocrity”:

[As Black people] We’re trained to be like, “If I’m not exceptional, I won’t be loved.” Certainly, I think that was my thing. So, yeah, I think I’m just learning now like, “You are allowed to be loved.” You don’t have to be excellent or aspire to that term, “Black excellence”. What the hell?

There’s so much White mediocrity that gets celebrated, and Black people, we have to be absolutely flawless to get half of [that] anyway. So, I’m slowly training myself out of that and being like, “no shit. You deserve love just for existing”.

As if all that wasn’t enough, Davies said it was right to be actively woke in TV drama today (“If [in 2024] you’re not writing [about women’s reproductive rights], what on Earth are you doing?”), and that his new version of Doctor Who was explicitly gay.

In reality, none of these people can afford to agree with the “bigoted” fans. Even if Davies, Capaldi, Tennant, Gatwa and Monsoon somehow secretly thought “the fans have a point”, they had to berate them. Anything less would be the end of their careers. The culture of the media has ratcheted to the point where people are compelled, on pain of irrelevance, to lecture, insult, antagonise and alienate the public.

All of this is in stark contrast to 2005. Then, the producers talked down the political correctness, emphasising that the show was for everyone. In 2024, they seemed to be deliberately repelling the public.

Equally damaging were comments from Davies that made it clear just how gay it was going to be. One example:

I think our rights are in danger. I’m talking as someone who’s lived through gay liberation, all the way through the AIDS crisis, all the way through to the freedoms that we have now. I can see them spinning and being endangered, so there’s no choice in this. And if the most exciting and entertaining action-adventure show on television can also do that, I think that’s wonderful.

So much for his defenders back in 2005 claiming he had no “gay agenda”.

Clearly, people had misinterpreted his January remarks. It wasn’t the aggressive politicising (wokery) that he objected to, just the bad writing. He didn’t see the former as an example of the latter. He believed that, with his talent, he could be aggressively political and deliver good scripts. This was double hubris - as would soon be demonstrated.

With “consumer resistance” to the imminent Season 1 becoming too loud to ignore, the mainstream media joined in with insulting the show’s fans. On the day it was to begin airing (the 11th of May) Metro newspaper published an article by a globohomo Muslima journalist with “a particular interest in covering the intersection of culture with LGBTQ+ issues, race and gender”. Her article had a very combative and contemptuous headline:

There was immediate backlash. Metro closed down their Twitter account for several days and changed the headline.

With this and similar spiteful coverage elsewhere, it was clear that the various organs of the rainbow regime were conspiring to demonise fans who objected to wokery. Of course, this was not to protect Doctor Who, but to protect wokery.

The arrogant comments from Davies and the more scathing comments from his colleagues (including three actors who had played the Doctor) must have done great damage to the relationship between the show and its fans.

Some of these individuals will be “true believers”, genuinely contemptuous of fans who disagree. For them, and I think Davies is one of them, the task is to surgically divide Doctor Who from its long-term “bigoted” fans who would somehow “hold it back” and are in any case “bad people”.

But others - such as Peter Davison who also weighed in but much more tactfully - will be well-meaning and reasonable individuals who don’t really believe in wokery but understand that it is “the name of the game” these days. Such people must have felt huge pressure to say “the right thing”.

Some tactful coordination by Bad Wolf, maybe working with a PR company, might have sweetened the pill with fans. But, by this time, so many sci-fi franchises had got away with insulting their fanbases that it would have been natural to assume there was no need to “pander” to “bigots”. In addition, wokery within the media had become so fervent that the idea of “apologising” for it would have seemed unthinkable, even evil.

As a result, people tasked with promoting the new Doctor Who were boxed into a corner and fated to have the opposite effect. They might as well have proclaimed that being a fan was a privilege granted only to the enlightened, those lucky few who held “the correct” opinions.

Their hostile remarks, combined with the disappointing nature of the 60th anniversary specials and Gatwa’s performance in the 2023 Christmas special, probably ensured that Season 1 would begin with low ratings. However, that this continued thereafter can be explained by a whole range of severe failings in Season 1 itself. We will get to the other failings later, but the most prominent one is ungodly heaps of wokery.

RTD2 Season 1:

• pro-refugees (Space Babies)

• pro-abortion (Space Babies)

• a loud, over-the-top transgender villain (who berates another character for assuming pronouns) played by a drag queen who can’t act (The Devil’s Chord)

• 1963 London portrayed as very diverse (The Devil’s Chord)

• attacks on Christian faith (Boom and Dot and Bubble)

• attack on capitalism (Boom)

• attack on White racism and “White privilege” with blond White supremacists “living in a bubble” and rejecting the Doctor’s help because he isn’t White (Dot and Bubble)

• Doctor flirting with a man (Dot and Bubble and Rogue)

• Doctor falling in love with and snogging a man (Rogue)

• Doctor gyrating his hips to disco music (Rogue)

• Regency English aristocracy portrayed as diverse (Rogue)

• attack on heteronormativity (Rogue)

• feminist preaching (Rogue)

• attack on class/hierarchy (Rogue)

• bitching about Elon Musk (The Legend of Ruby Sunday)

• mention of “cultural appropriation” (Empire of Death)

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Davies might have been able to get away with all of this had Season 1 been as well-written and well-made as his 2005 revival. Going by his various remarks, he clearly thought he had this “in the bag”. Unfortunately, it turned out to be deficient in a whole slew of ways. People had been expecting the wokery, but, given Davies’ record of competence, what they hadn’t been expecting was the astonishingly low quality of Season 1:

• Gatwa had been touted as a brilliant actor. Whether through lack of talent or bad direction, he was unconvincing and cartoonish in the role, with no gravitas. Many people felt he was simply playing himself.

• Bad writing: plot holes, contradictions, bad pacing, plot contrivances, unexplained connections, clumsy infodumping, red herrings, childish elements (eg. a monster made of snot) and deus ex machina resolutions.

• Bad decisions with strategy: the episode count was slashed from thirteen to eight (despite the huge budget increase), the season opened with two truly horrendous episodes, the Doctor is absent throughout much of his debut season, and after introducing companion Ruby the show skips ahead six months so that we entirely miss her and the Doctor getting to know each other and her adjusting to life as a time-traveller.

• Bad decisions with characterisation: the Doctor cries in nearly every episode and is emotionally loud, he is often not the one who “saves the day” or resolves things, and there are out-of-place gay references like characters addressing each other as “babes”.

• The genre was expanded beyond science-fiction. Having introduced soap opera and romance in 2005, Davies now inflated things even further. The episode 73 Yards is essentially a ghost story, while The Devil’s Chord is nonsensical fantasy. Other fantasy elements were present in the Doctor simply blowing a dead butterfly back to life, and a pantheon of “gods” terrorising the Universe. Whereas sci-fi requires logic and explanations, fantasy doesn’t. This probably explains why Davies’ 2005-10 episodes often had deus ex machina resolutions; he is simply not a good sci-fi writer, so now he has changed a 60 year-old show to better suit his talents.

Davies was screwing up, in a whole variety of ways. He had lost his talent as a writer, his strategy as a showrunner, and his humility as a man. But he seemed completely unaware of this, happy in a haze of smug complacency.

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Davies is a man naturally given to arrogance. If his social or professional status does not depend on putting out high quality work, then he is quite happy to just churn out drivel. That didn’t happen in the 1990s or the 2000s, because at that point his career really did depend on doing good work. But by the mid 2010s he had ascended to a level of prestige such that he could start being lazy.

In 2015, he wrote Cucumber whose scripts were considered in need of re-drafting by many of his own colleagues, but none of them were in a position to tell him that. And neither was he of the right nature to correct the problem himself. He lacked the humility to think “have I really done as well as I could do here?”

In 2018, he claimed the opposite effect, that while he used to just rattle off scripts, he was “full of doubt now”. I suspect that was just gay histrionics, or even sheer affectation.

But all of this was before the BBC came to him in 2021, needing him to rescue their flagship and willing to give him whatever he wanted, including total creative autonomy.

We say that absolute power corrupts absolutely, but so does absolute freedom. That is what happened to Davies when he was given total free rein over Doctor Who. Any remaining concerns he had about putting out good scripts now evaporated. As a result, he not only betrayed the show and his fellow fans, he actually forgot how to be a good writer. He degraded his own craft, his raison d’etre, by indulging in sheer freedom. He couldn’t hold back, and there was nobody to save him from himself:

It’s very hard for anyone to stop me doing these things. You’d have to be a pretty brave executive to say “don’t go there” to me.

It even sounds ominous.

To give a flavour of how this sheer creative freedom corrupted him…

• The episode 73 Yards has major unanswered questions, but Davies proudly declared that he will never answer them, even though they are key to making the plot work.

• The episode The Devil’s Chord ends with a song & dance performance, as in a musical. There has never been anything like this in the show’s 60-year history, and it absolutely didn’t “work”. Davies feels no need to justify it. At Comic-Con 2024 he promised more such material in season 2.

• For the first time ever in Doctor Who, there is breaking of the fourth wall. On one occasion the Doctor winks to the camera, and there is a character (Mrs Flood) who regularly speaks to the audience. Davies says that he and Bad Wolf have an in-story explanation for Mrs Flood doing this, but he feels no need to share it. At Comic-Con he simply declared that breaking the fourth wall was going to be “part of the show going forward”. He even said “[it works, because] there’s something showy about Doctor Who – there’s something proscenium arch about it.” That is utterly untrue of Doctor Who throughout its 60-year history, but is true of his new version of it. He has changed the show fundamentally, but he would rather not admit this so instead he simply asserts that it was always this way.

But perhaps the most glaring and offensive example of his arrogance came in one of the 60th anniversary episodes in 2023. He had Isaac Newton (played by an Indian) mis-hear something the Doctor said, and as a consequence, mis-name gravity “mavity”. This seemed like a silly gag that would be over by the end of the episode. Instead, Davies has made it part of the show’s lore. From now on, anyone writing for Doctor Who, in any medium and in any spin-off, has to refer to gravity as “mavity”.

Explaining this to SFX Magazine after Season 1 had aired, Davies seemed like a man who had gone insane with power, even mocking people who were hoping for some kind of resolution. Apparently he was banging his fist on the desk while saying:

It’s not resolved, it’s permanent. It’s absolutely permanent. That’s what gravity is. It’s funny. It’s very funny and it makes me laugh and it’s staying.

It’s enormously funny. All the comic strip people are having to do it, all the novel people are having to do it. How funny is that? I think people are kind of looking for a plot in it. I can’t imagine what that would be. What on earth would that be? If anyone came up with a good plot based on the fact that a word has changed two of its consonants then good luck. He said, having built entire plots out of puns!

In the end, it’s immensely creative. That’s what’s brilliant.

But no, to destroy and distort is not to create. I am reminded of the famous quote from Tolkien:

There had been signs before now of Davies being an egomaniac. Back in 2005 he had seemed full of himself in interviews about his Who revival, but that could be charitably interpreted as a man who was simply gregarious, or a man carried away with his love for the show.

But what might have been enthusiasm in 2005 was, in 2024, clearly just sheer egotism. He did many interviews, boasting endlessly about the quality of his writing in Season 1. Here he is talking about its overall story arc:

But as we saw at Christmas, there is obviously a mystery to Ruby’s birth family... That story is not finished. Who is her mother? How can they possibly find out what went on? The way the Doctor ties into this is fascinating. This emotional man I’ve been talking about opens up about his family in a way that he’s never done before.

He left his family behind in 1963 and practically never mentioned it again. That’s a man who doesn’t know his family, and that is fascinating. So as his mind is focusing on that, Ruby’s mind is focusing on her family. Those two stories come together in possibly the greatest finale ever committed to film… it really is an astonishing climax.

Remember he is talking about his own work, so the gushing is very distasteful. I must also say that everything in that quote was disproven when the episodes aired. The Doctor doesn’t “open up” about his family. His mind isn’t “focusing on that”. Davies might have intended this to be conveyed throughout the season, but if so he failed totally. What’s more, the climax is not “astonishing” and it certainly isn’t “possibly the greatest finale” ever filmed. The way the two storylines “come together” is itself laughably nonsensical. The way the Doctor ties into Ruby’s storyline is not fascinating. As for the revelation of Ruby’s mother, it is a dreadful anticlimax, as is the explanation for Ruby herself being “special”. The entire thing, in micro and macro, is bad. But Davies clearly thinks he has written something tremendous.

Complacency could also be seen when he spoke of the show’s woke “teachable moments”:

Well, I hope it’s not judgmental. You need never think of [it] as a lesson, because, actually, that’s a guaranteed way to make people turn off.

Yet, he spoke of the racism theme in Dot and Bubble exactly as a lesson:

Will you be 10 minutes into it, will you be 15, will you be 20 before you start to think, “everyone in this community is White”? And if you didn’t think that, why didn’t you?

He wasn’t careful enough to realise that this is exactly the judgemental moralising that makes people “turn off”.

Russell T Davies has enacted a lesson for the rest of us: without humility, talent will eventually perish.

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Let us gaze now upon the appallingly low ratings of Season 1, within the context of the show’s history since 2005:

To zoom in on the “RTD2” era:

Compare the 2023 specials (left) with Season 1 (middle). What a difference half a year can make, especially when you spend it losing friends and insulting people. The average was 3.7 million viewers per episode. These are the lowest ratings in the show’s 60-year history.

It fared worse than Chris Chibnall’s final season. This is embarrassing, because Davies was brought in precisely to undo the damage Chibnall had done. But, more significantly, it fared worse than the classic series’ final season in 1989, which had led to cancellation and the show’s painful 16-year hiatus.

Before we compare the ratings with 1989, let us consider the resources that went into these respective productions.

In terms of budget, the 1989 season cost about £100,000 per story. Given four episodes per story plus inflation, that shakes out at about £100,000 per episode in today’s money. But the episodes are twice as long today, so the comparator would be £200,000. By contrast, the RTD2 budget is about twenty times that amount - £4,000,000.

Also, time allotted for writing, filming and post-production was severely limited in 1989 compared to 2024.

Also, all of the writers in 1989 were either first-timers or second-timers, very inexperienced. Even the script editor, Andrew Cartmel, had been an IT guy just three years earlier. By contrast, all of the writers involved in 2024’s Season 1 (Davies, Steven Moffat, Kate Herron and Briony Redman) had a wealth of experience in writing for TV.

Now, how do the ratings compare?

The purple line represents the 1989 ratings and the pink lines represent various ways of counting the 2024 ratings: overnight, 7-day, and 7-day consolidated. (I am ignoring one other way that is occasionally cited, 28-day consolidated, because it seems preposterous to use such a metric.) The 7-day consolidated is generally considered the most appropriate comparator, and that is the bright pink line.

Obviously, the RTD2 era is not competing well against the 1989 season. But the picture becomes clearer if we look at the averages:

An average of 3.7m against 1989’s 4.15m. This was despite the 2024 season:

• being broadcast on Saturday at primetime instead of Wednesday opposite Coronation Street

• the gigantically bigger budget (20x)

• the prestige of Russell T Davies

• special effects and editing being much cheaper and slicker than in 1989

• a bigger population (56m in 1989, 67m in 2024)

• the huge advertising push

All the extra money, time, resources, production capability, advertising, and even six extra days for people to watch… yet Russell T Davies’ grand new era is beaten by the 1989 season - which was the least popular of the classic show and led to its cancellation.

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Since RTD2 Who was an officially trans-Atlantic enterprise, we should also look at how Season 1 fared in America.

Part of the deal with Disney was that each episode would debut on the streaming platform DisneyPlus. Money was spent advertising the show in places where most people would never have heard of it. Apparently it was trailed during TV coverage of the NBA Finals. An entire carriage of the New York subway was decorated externally…

… and internally…

… and Ncuti Gatwa appeared on the cover of Time Magazine, no less…

… yet, for all this, the ratings on DisneyPlus were pitiful. Probably fewer than 90,000 people watched each episode, and certainly less than 156,000 (which would have been only 0.1% of DisneyPlus subscribers).

How can such staggering unpopularity be explained? To be blunt, Doctor Who is something that Americans, en masse, are simply allergic to. I already listed some reasons in Part 1 and won’t repeat them here, but I will say that the lesson of 1996 shouldn’t have been forgotten. The BBC shouldn’t have assumed that the cultural incompatibility would somehow be alleviated by the advent of streaming. What has been shown in 2024 is that, no matter how easy and convenient you make Doctor Who for the American public, it simply won’t fly.

The BBC wanted to take it “global” and have it “up there” alongside Star Trek and Star Wars. I think we have been shown (again) that this simply cannot happen. Doctor Who is a property that cannot be transformed into “a global brand”. It has to remain shamelessly British - and a few people from other countries will love it. That is assured just by keeping the show exactly as it was. To seek more international fans by making it “a global brand” is not only impossible, but fatal.

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However, Season 1’s truly damning failure is its unpopularity back home in Britain.

It ended with a two-part finale (The Legend of Ruby Sunday and Empire of Death) that was something of an improvement. The second part was riddled with deus ex machina, plot holes, plot contrivances, red herrings and unanswered questions, but I did enjoy the first part for its pacing and slow build-up. Both episodes had a generally more serious tone and almost no wokery at all.

But by now the general public had been repelled. The two episodes got lower ratings than all but one of the preceding six.

Also, the finale was screened at 275 cinemas around Britain. This had been done a decade earlier for the 50th anniversary special, and it had made £1.8 million in ticket sales (about £2.4 million today). This time the takings were much slimmer: a mere £364,253. If the average ticket price was £12, this means around 30,000 people went to see it nationwide.

It was a humiliating climax to a season that had been an unmitigated, gruelling, infuriating and dumbfounding disaster.