The Seeds of Gay Doom (VII. Damaged Gays)

"Yet each man kills the thing he loves"

(Note: this essay is the final in a series.)

The RTD2 era of Doctor Who is surely one of the greatest screw-ups in modern television. Russell T Davies had plenty of time, plenty of money, plenty of talent, and plenty of writers both accomplished and waiting in the wings ready to churn out good scripts. In theory it should have been a triumph. Instead it was a catastrophe on every level.

Exactly how this occurred is a question that vexes many. The scale of it is hard to believe.

Possible explanations:

• the general rise of media wokery since 2010

• Disney stipulations

• BBC stipulations

• lifelong vendettas that Davies had to restrain in the pre-woke era could now be unleashed

• power going to his head, making him complacent and arrogant

• in his gay progressive media bubble, Davies has come to genuinely believe this is the norm now (yet, paradoxically, that it could all be lost at any moment)

• at 61, Davies is desperate to be cool and edgy

If this is the witch’s brew, can we make sense of it?

Libertarians want to blame the state funding (BBC), but Disney was involved. Socialists want to blame capitalism, but state funding was involved. Of course, both could be right, and probably are. Everything the socialised BBC makes nowadays is awful. Everything the capitalistic Disney makes nowadays is awful. It’s no surprise that a co-production between them is awful.

But, unless we believe that they forced the hand of Russell T Davies, we have to conclude that the primary culprit is neither the BBC nor Disney, but Davies himself. This would make sense given our earlier review of his career, and given that, on this project, he seems to have enjoyed virtually total freedom. If the Times article was accurate (and it could easily have been refuted but never was) then the BBC could not veto a single decision that Davies took; he had made sure of it.

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Social justice has gone beyond saturation point; it is destroying franchises left, right and centre, and audiences are sick of it. In order to save, not just particular sci-fi franchises, but the entire genre of sci-fi and perhaps the very medium of televised drama, rowing back on wokery is now a necessity. But Davies would never do that.

Social justice is not something he does just because it’s fashionable; it is an overriding obsession that has dominated his life and defined his career. He was doing this kind of thing long before it became standard and will be doing it long after it becomes passé. He will be like the stranded Japanese soldier still fighting WW2 decades later because he never “got the memo”.

But, fittingly for a trailblazer, Davies is taking wokery farther than anyone else. With an “OG” like him, someone who has a genuine grievance against historical limits rather than just a fashionable disdain, it’s as if we are returning to “the source” and getting a purer attitude than can be mimicked forty years later by some teenager on a Gender Studies degree. This is Boomer original, not Zoomer emulation.

But that “pure attitude” is not only resentment. It does not spring merely from coming of age in 1970s Welsh schools where boorish boys beat up fledgling “poofs”. It is an outlook that is bolstered by academia and approved by the culture at large, which transmits it via Marc Bolan, Dennis Potter, Joe Orton, Quentin Crisp, Oscar Wilde… It is enabled by a century of deconstruction, material comfort, and individualism.

I could outline this “pure attitude”, but Davies can do it for me. Here he is describing the Doctor, as he conceptualises him in the RTD2 era:

[He] just goes anywhere for no reason. It’s not his job, it’s not his mission, it’s not his task, it’s not a quest, he just pops off to the next place at random, and that is joyously freewheeling.

He has the Doctor describe himself similarly in Space Babies:

I don’t have a people. I don’t have a home. But I don’t have a job either. I don’t have a boss, or taxes, or rent, or bills to pay. I don’t have a purpose, or a cause or a mission. But I have freedom. That’s why I keep moving on - to see the next thing, and the next, and the next.

This is the quintessence of liberalism: to be entirely without attachment, dependants, duties, obligations or limitations; to be without either a boss or a god, any higher order at all that might curtail one’s choices; to be entirely free - free to experience countless novelties. It is the end point of consumerist materialism, but also the end point of woke transhumanism.

Davies thinks this is exciting and “joyous”. But, as we saw during COVID, ordinary people don’t want to be free to the point of aimlessness. They crave duty and purpose. For the main character in a drama, no less, to be absolutely free is not inspiring at all; it is deadening, even depressing.

Since his (new) description of the Doctor is not even accurate, Davies is really crowbarring it in. He clearly has a reason that is outside the show. It’s how he would like the Doctor to be, just as he would like everyone to be gay, or trans, or bi, or at least be absolutely fine with it - the collapsing of all categories, the erasure of all limits. But this is antithetical to humanity, and his characterisation of the Doctor is antithetical to the show.

So, too, is the genre shift towards fantasy. The reason is the same (to escape the limits of science-fiction) and the effect is the same (to remove tension from the show since nothing has to make sense or be consistent any more).

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Davies was well aware, before and during and after the airing of Season 1, that there was a groundswell of complaint on social media. As shown above, YouTube was very active, but when talking about the matter Davies always focussed on Twitter/X.

[When we lament a fandom’s alleged resistance to inclusion] are we actually talking about society now? Or are we talking about a single platform [Twitter] that is very noisy? None of us knows the answer to that.

The show’s low ratings surely confirm that Twitter was accurately representing general society and that the objections posted on there were shared by most ordinary people, but Davies doesn’t want to admit that. Nor does he want to admit that it wasn’t only on Twitter.

So it feels like we’re having a conversation into an echoing box. Unless you lift your head, and then the world is very different. Or you have to hope that the world is very different.

Yes, he is hoping. But in truth there is only so far you can push the public, and it is obvious there is only so far. Of course there is going to be a limit. And that limit is where they feel that your demands and indulgences could harm their children, or even other people’s children.

But Davies doesn’t think of that. So locked is he in his obsession with gay rights and individual freedom, he ignores all possible reasons against it and keeps on fighting “bigots”:

So what do we do except keep on fighting? And I think it is a fight. I’m conscious of being part of it. It’s a tough old battle... but I simply will not back down.

This, I think, is how Davies ended up killing the thing he loved. In 2005, he used his cherished TV show to ask for tolerance from the mainstream, and at first he received it. But he pushed too far. As the years passed, and the world grew ever more tolerant of sexual deviance, he became ever less grateful, ever more entitled, demanding, obnoxious, preachy and self-righteous. In 2023, he used his cherished TV show to reprimand the mainstream. In the process he made it unwatchable, alienating it (and himself) from the mainstream.

By Comic-Con in late July, he was declaring that trans rights was more important than Doctor Who. For a man who used to decry “issue-led drama”, this was an astonishing thing to say. But it got a round of applause from the audience of Comic-Con attendees, indicating how divorced from mainstream opinion that subculture now is. And it is a subculture that Davies himself helped to cultivate, with Doctor Who back in 2005 and especially with Torchwood. It is a subculture of confused females and emasculated males who are obsessed with being different. These people are fanatical about science-fiction franchises, but will celebrate those franchises being twisted out of recognition in the name of trans rights, gay rights, multiculturalism, feminism, etc. - this nexus of ideologies being their religion.

Many of these people are politicised gays - far more politicised post-2005 than they would have been in, say, 1995. Many are young people not given sufficient lead by social convention, and left to drift into the various categories awaiting them on Tumblr. After this social group was brought together in the post-Buffy world of sci-fi/fantasy fandom, they became the “SJWs” of the mid 2010s and in some cases the violent antifa of the late 2010s and certainly the BLM rainbow drones of the early 2020s, the childless Millennials who still cling today to the progressive activism which once gave them a sense of purpose and triumph.

For a flavour of how such people think about Doctor Who, here is an account of some gay fans discussing Season 1:

UNWIN: It’s the first time that the Doctor talks like I do, as a gay man.

McCURDY: I feel exactly the same, he’s talking like how I talk.

BEVERIDGE: The Doctor has always appealed to gay men, because he’s a nonconventional male role model. So having the Doctor be more queer has allowed people to identify that bit more closely with him.

Such a fundamental change to a 60 year-old character is apparently perfectly fine, if it panders to your own feelings.

Back at Comic-Con, Davies’ rambling elaboration about trans rights brought back his endless obsession with being persecuted:

I don’t go online much. Maybe I should, maybe that’s wrong. I’m talking about Twitter/X as “the portal” online. I don’t feel particularly safe [on Twitter] as a gay man. Increasingly, I think that it’s worse, worse, and worse in society. I see what’s said out there, but that’s a long discussion for another time. But I’m not sure I can even be part of that. So that’s tricky. So that stops me going online in many ways... So I get my agent telling me what’s going on... I think Doctor Who’s fine… I think there are things happening in the culture wars, particularly with trans rights these days that are a million times more important than what’s happening with Doctor Who.

There are several points to pick up on here.

First, he says he’s fighting “battles” with gay/trans issues, but also that he does not like to take part in debate online regarding those issues. He doesn’t feel “safe” on Twitter. Knowing what is said on there stops him going on. In other words, this is a man who cannot defend his ideas on a level playing field, and knows he can’t, so prefers to use his massive MSM soapbox to preach to people instead of debating with them on an equal footing. You could not get a clearer demonstration of condescending, arrogant progressive elitism.

Second, it confirms his long-held loathing of Twitter, especially since Elon Musk took it over. This in turn confirms that the sly mention in Season 1 of an evil tech billionaire was indeed a reference to Musk. It is also another reflection of the change in the Left since Trump/Brexit: before, they were very pro freedom of speech, but afterwards they have turned against it, to such an extent that they demonise Musk for enabling it amidst a climate of near-universal and arbitrary leftist censorship.

Third, his focussing on Twitter seems tactical. Instagram, Facebook and especially YouTube were also ablaze with vituperation about RTD2, but those platforms don’t have “a reputation” that can be invoked in order to neutralise the criticism. By contrast, post Musk’s take-over, Twitter is “understood” by leftie liberals (Davies’ people) to be a den of right-wing fanaticism, hatred, conspiracy theory, bigotry and stupidity, therefore it actually plays in Davies’ favour to associate it with opposition to RTD2. This casts said opposition as a product of the right-wing bogeyman, not of ordinary people.

Fourth, I think his statement about trans rights being “a million times more important than what’s happening with Doctor Who” should be interpreted carefully. He specifies “what’s happening with” the programme, not the programme itself. I think his actual meaning is that the controversy surrounding his revamp of Doctor Who is less important than trans rights, so please talk about that instead of his monumental screw-up.

He continued:

[There are] battles to be fought. And it’s getting worse. It’s… it’s terrifying.

His co-panellist said:

You’re fighting some of those battles on the show just by [having] the [minority] representation.

Davies agreed:

I do that on purpose… Absolutely, that’s part of the battle.

Given these comments, there is no ambiguity: Davies no longer primarily sees Doctor Who as a thing in its own right that exists outside of him, but as his personal plaything and his vehicle for pushing his political views - onto children. He has ceased being a dramatist and become a demented propagandist. The results of this were celebrated by Comic-Con, but rejected by a nation.

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The question, of course, is what will happen now.

The immediate factor is that the next season of this abomination has already been made. It wrapped filming just before Season 1 began airing. As a result, there is no time - and no money - to make any changes based on feedback about Season 1. The BBC, Disney and Bad Wolf can now only grit their teeth for a full year while Season 2 is post-produced and then, eventually, broadcast. The ratings will certainly be as low as for Season 1, probably lower. Everyone involved will know this, but they are powerless to avert it.

Millie Gibson and Varada Sethu

Apart from the obvious reasons for further decline, there is the fact that the Doctor’s companion will no longer be a cute blonde girl, but an Indian girl. With the best will in the world, that simply isn’t going to “bring in the dads”. In Britain, having a show without any White leads is asking for commercial death. More importantly, it completes the process of detaching Doctor Who from the White British boys who, for sixty years, identified with it. I am sure many of them will want to watch, but they will find themselves strangely unengaged by it. They probably won’t understand why, but they will turn off.

Back in 2016, as he was embarking on the wokery that brought his own tenure to its knees, Steven Moffat adventurously (and self-contradictorily) remarked:

Two non-white leads would be amazing. In fact, a lot of people would barely notice.

Well, now we are going to find out.

Then there is the fact that, while Season 1 was dominated by scripts written by Davies, he has said of Season 2:

Obviously, I wanted women writing, and I’m aware that we haven’t got enough women writing or writers of colour, which we’re fixing in the next series to come.

The last time a coloured person wrote for Doctor Who, we got an episode about Rosa Parks. Davies might have enough sense to keep it less obnoxious than that, but I doubt it.

During Chris Chibnall’s tenure, the mainstream media at first sang his praises but eventually had to admit his failure and incompetence. It is an open question whether they will be able to admit the same of Davies, who is a much more prominent and powerful figure, and also much more beloved by luvvies, than Chibnall. Certainly, during Season 1, no mainstream journalist could admit the problem.

While it was playing out, various organs attempted to hide the damage. Rotten Tomatoes froze public reviews throughout the majority of the broadcast period because they were so at odds with those of “professional critics” (regime apparatchiks):

As the low ratings gradually emerged, there was a scramble among dedicated fans to delude themselves. First they said that the warm weather had kept people outdoors. By season’s end they had come up with a whole slew of excuses:

Meantime, the BBC themselves kept quiet. In fact, they kept so quiet as to withhold the Audience Appreciation Index numbers. Traditionally disclosed shortly after broadcast, this metric is the main indication of how a show is faring. At time of writing the BBC have still not released these numbers. To my knowledge this has never happened before, certainly not with Doctor Who.

But eventually, inevitably, cracks started to appear.

The first sign of doom came on the 11th of June 2024. Davies revealed:

I’m working on the fourth script now for [Season 3]. It’s not actually commissioned, that’s still up in the air. But that’s the same for every TV programme. I shouldn’t say we’re confident, because that’s asking for a fall, but we’re very confident, to be honest. And we’ll just keep going.

Asking for a fall, indeed. By the time of this interview, Season 1 was three-quarters over. At time of writing, another two months have passed and, as far as is known, the BBC and Disney have still not commissioned Season 3. For that not to have happened by this point is notable, to say the least.

Davies did acknowledge the show’s low ratings:

You know, they might not be the ratings we’d love. We always want higher.

Then - and this is so desperate that I think it must signal that, deep down, he knows the truth - Davies mentioned the 28-day cumulative ratings. I had never heard of this metric before, let alone seen it used as a barometer of success.

But they are building over the 28-day period. Episode 1, Space Babies, is already up to 5.6 million and counting. So it is getting there.

Every episode between 2005 and 2017 got 5.6m views on its first night. Taking 28 days to reach the same number is an astonishing decline.

Davies also claimed:

according to the people who juggle the numbers, all targets have been reached and exceeded. The BBC are running around like mad things.

This seems like it must be an outright lie.

Asked whether, in retrospect, he would do anything differently with the RTD2 era, he replied:

I mean, no, to be honest – I’m very proud of it!

This seems to me like a man staving off an impending terrible reality.

The first article which openly suggested that Disney might withdraw, and even that the BBC might axe the show, came on the 17th of July. It also suggested that Gatwa might not film any more episodes, returning only to film a death scene for his Doctor, to cap the (already filmed) Season 2. Ominously, at Comic-Con a few weeks later, Davies refused to say whether Gatwa’s contract would be renewed for Season 3. It seemed that he was preparing to throw Gatwa under the bus in an attempt to save his own skin and ensure that there will even be a Season 3.

Whatever happens next, I think it is inevitable that Davies’ stature in the media will be diminished. The general public will now associate him with a hugely expensive show that was widely hated. His industry colleagues will be aware of this. As a result, who would have him fronting or overseeing anything in the future? I think, while he throws Gatwa under the bus, his colleagues and rivals will do the same - or worse - to him. He will end up as the fall guy taking the blame for this disaster, while all the media executives who egged him on will appear spotless.

And that, really, is the sick part. Davies has made a fool of himself, but who led him to do that? Who never held him back? Who encouraged him every step of the way, and applauded every little piece of subversion he laid upon the British public?

Russell T Davies is a damaged man who, in a better age, would have been discouraged by his peers and bosses from indulging that chip on his shoulder, and instead encouraged to look inside himself and recycle his anguish into something good, healthy, positive and nourishing - something true, something worthy of a man with his talents. Instead, he was encouraged to make a fetish and a lifestyle and a crusade out of opposing the mainstream, hating heteronormativity, demonising fathers, twisting characters (including Shakespearean characters and even Shakespeare himself!) and assaulting the standards upon which society depends. For doing this, he was showered with awards, accolades, recognition, and money. It is all blowing up now, and I suspect he will be left alone in his house with his Baftas, wondering when the phone is going to ring.

But perhaps the most tragic thing is that Davies, an intelligent man, will be stultified by his prejudices and therefore won’t learn from this experience. Instead, he will interpret the ratings sink as proof that the British public are homophobic after all, despite their façades, and he was right all along! In actuality, if he had just kept his expectations as they were in 2005, the public would be less homophobic now, and he would be the queen of the world again.

As for what his failure means for the show, that is less clear to me. Even in the commercial doldrums, Doctor Who remains a valuable property in terms of cultural prestige. Maybe the BBC will terminate their contract with Bad Wolf and replace Davies with some energetic upstart. Maybe they will “rest” the show for a decade or so then bring it back with a wholly new creative team. Since they can’t afford the “necessary” budget on their own, they might simply sell it off to Disney. This would certainly be the worst option, but it might be the only viable one for a BBC that refuses to make the show at a lower budget thanks to the belief held since 2005 that it must never be a charming little cult TV show again.

And, since that belief - which has crippled and doomed the show - was established by Russell T Davies himself, it could be said that he has destroyed Doctor Who in a deeper and more insidious way than the obvious. A more secure man, a more sane man, would have known the value of simple things and told the BBC not to corrupt Doctor Who by forcing it to compete on the global stage. But, in 2005 and ever since, Davies advocated the very opposite - even though it would surely kill the thing he loved.

In the meantime he has corrupted it in many other ways, catalogued in this series. Corrupting seems to be what he does best. He has done it since first getting any power in 1993, and since then, the more power he has gathered, the more he has corrupted whatever was under his control. He is a man who, unrestrained by others, can only corrupt.

This is because he is consumed by loathing - of the healthy, of the traditional, of heterosexuality, of hierarchy, of reproduction, of nationhood, of rootedness, of truth, of honesty, and above all, of himself. He is a man who never fitted into his society but never had the humility to make peace with it, so was forced to work against it and attempt to weaken it in every possible way so that it could not threaten him. As a result, he lives in constant fear of reprisal, of healthy order one day reasserting itself, and so again, he must do everything he can to prevent this from ever happening. It is a vicious spiral, propelled by his own lack of humility and self-knowledge. As such, he is the very embodiment of corruption.

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In the twelve episodes so far of the RTD2 era, only two normal parent-child relationships are depicted. These occur in Boom (a widower with his daughter) and Empire of Dust (an unnamed widow with her baby).

Parent-child relationships used to be very commonly seen in TV drama, including Doctor Who. In the RTD2 tenure, they are present but almost always as abnormal variants:

• transgender mixed-race Rose with her White mother

• White Ruby with her Black lesbian stepmother

• Ruby finding the mother who abandoned her as a baby

Note that, in all of these, the parent is a mother. Boom is therefore the only episode to depict a father¹. It is no surprise that fathers are absent from Davies’ episodes. He has long had a penchant for depicting fathers as cruel, selfish, irresponsible, homophobic bullies, or else deceased. In fact, his story arc for this season (about Ruby being a foundling) actually provided an ideal opportunity to look at the other side of things - the important and unique role of one’s father in one’s life - but Ruby has no interest in finding her father, only her mother. The father is never even mentioned until the final episode, and then only briefly (and not depicted, unlike the mother).

With this, and the total absence of ordinary parent-child relationships from the season² but for the unnamed widow, Boom stands in the starkest contrast. Its depiction of family isn’t subversive in any way; the father and daughter are both White, both Christian, and (apparently) both straight and “cisgender”. What’s more, they are devoted to each other. We see attachment, tenderness, laughter and love between them, and the responsibility that each has towards the other. It rings true and warms the heart. It reminds us of what the vast majority of us should be doing: not seeking endless novelty, but creating heterosexual families and becoming parents.

As a viewer, having so far been faced with a panoply of gays, transgenders, race-mixers, childless adults, parentless children, mechanically-gestated children, and other baffling edge-cases, it is so nice to finally see this healthy and life-affirming thing: a father loving his daughter, a daughter loving her daddy. The feeling is one of great relief - “Oh yes, normality…”

The two characters are unique but they represent a form that we are familiar with. While watching them we can refer to that form, and see it perhaps countered by some of their quirks, but ultimately and beautifully affirmed - a social norm renewed, to the benefit of society and the vast majority of people.

The other episode not written by Davies is Rogue. It was by two SJW women, one of them bisexual and the other almost certainly gay. Their episode is completely without any mention of family, and features the Doctor snogging a man. All the characters are rootless individuals, seeking thrills and novelty.

This is the extent to which family formation and parenthood are in the lives and thoughts of modern sci-fi writers. Of the five parent-child relationships depicted across twelve episodes, only two are normal and only the one in Boom has a father.

Boom happens to be the only episode written by a heterosexual and the only episode written by a father - Steven Moffat, who is a White, 60-something family man. How many men like that get scripts commissioned nowadays? I believe it only happened here because Moffat is a previous showrunner. If not for that commission, Season 1 would depict only one normal parent-child relationship and would be entirely devoid of fathers. But it would be full of sexual deviance.

This is Russell T Davies’ world. This is the end stage of liberalism: freedom, but barrenness.

When he speaks of joy, I believe it is self-delusion.

It’s a lot of work, joy. It’s very hard to achieve on screen. Anyone can cry in the rain. Sadness is comparatively easy: thunder, it rains, cry, that’s all done. I believe in reaching and pushing for the greatest emotions that you can possibly get. Pushing towards joy.

The trouble is that, in drama, joy only matters if it is worked for. Otherwise, it feels meaningless - a smiling face pasted over a hollow interior. This is how “joy” feels in Davies’ second tenure: fake, shallow, unearned, cheap, sickly. The Doctor is forever talking about joy and looking joyous, but never do we see him earning his joy with struggle. We do see him running away from responsibility quite a few times, though. We see him reduced to crying in almost every episode - a fragile emotional wreck. He is an indulgent, selfish, weak, decadent, shallow, vain, irresponsible and cowardly character without any backbone or sense of duty.

With that in mind, let us return to that quote from the Sisterhood of Karn’s founder:

Gay people are more in touch with their childhood than straight people - they don’t have to go through the processes of marriage, mortgages, kids. However old we are, we don’t feel the need to cast off our childhood. We don’t feel ashamed to have a Teddy bear. Except instead of a Teddy bear, we have a Dalek.

Here we have the explanation of it all: we are talking about people who have never grown up, and never will grow up. They are obsessed with and fascinated by their own childhood, or the idea of childhood. This fascination shields them from nature’s demand to grow up, but in the shielding it has become rotten. Such is the toll nature exacts on anything that defies it. So the fascination which started so well is soon morbidity with a smiling face, corruption with the look of innocence, misery with the look of joy, poison with the look of health.

Some things in life cannot be resisted safely. One of them is the call to grow up. Not even science-fiction can protect us from this duty or from the consequences of ignoring it. But it can distract us. It is the most lovely distraction.

1. In episode Empire of Death, two fathers are mentioned but neither is depicted. One was 15 and abandoned the baby he fathered. The other has died - but even when he has supposedly been resurrected and the family should in theory be back together, he is still not depicted: only his baby with its (single) mother.

2. In episode Dot and Bubble, we see a photo of a character’s mother. Both are straight and White, but we don’t see them interacting in any way so it is more a mention than a depiction of a relationship.