Doctor Who and the Audience of Doom
Series 12 is crunch-time for the #GoWokeGoBroke Doctor...
After the divisive series 11, the Whittaker/Chibnall era is at the crunch point as series 12 starts to air.
What are the chances for the show? Will series 12 be a success? What might be its undoing?
This Doctor Who Fans view…
Hello all
With the debut of series 12 of Doctor Who a few hours away, I thought I would set these thoughts down and set my cards on the table before we see how the public reception goes.
As I have frequently said, I supported the decision to go for a female Doctor: no it’s not the choice I would have made, but I decided to trust the BBC to get it right (they wouldn’t let a female Doctor be just a cypher for intersectional feminism and wreck their golden egg, would they?).
I thought we would be getting something more like a good version of Missy, or a Romana, a character that would fill the boots not just of the Doctor but the Time Lords and Ladies of Gallifrey itself, who would have an Alien but female perspective quite apart from the faddish mores of social media society.
For this I apologise: its hard sometimes to believe people could be so bloody stupid, only to find out as events unfold, oh yes they can! Never underestimate human stupidity, as Mark Twain once said.
So I wasn’t paying attention to social media about the show before series 11 aired, I just sat down to watch it, and honestly episode one wasn’t too bad… but from there it was all downhill, and a brief moment up on the crane in “The Woman Who Fell To Earth” is the only time Jodie ever managed to actually feel like the Doctor to me over the rest of the whole series.
This hesitant, unconfident, nervous and insecure performance, which was how I saw her portrayal of the part throughout series 11, especially in episode 4, was later confirmed by Whitaker herself in her podcast with David Tennant, where she openly stated she didn’t know how to play the scenes, got sod all useful advice, and was clearly lost in the role.
How had this happened? What was this terrible miscasting, and just how incompetent was Chris Chibnall for putting out ten episodes of really bad dull television, throwing away the progress of series 10? (Apart from a token woke award or two, Series 11 went on to fail to win a single recognisable Television Award no matter how the production tried to wrangle one.)
Of course the BBC (Not a propaganda channel, honest, says Andrew Neil) did a masterpiece of spin: this was their baby, its failure is their failure, so they got very creative. Series 11 did start on a record high opening: but it dropped like a stone, losing HALF its audience by the end of the series, the fastest rate of drop-off ever, and never recovering with a “rally” for a single week, not even the awful finale. To hide this the BBC arraigned for masses of media reporting “record” ratings and “rave reviews” based ONLY on episode 1, and calculated the shows ratings by a new method that significantly boosted the numbers by counting every single way anyone might watch the show over a month, not just the viewing figures for broadcast + I player overnights. But even this could only hide an unprecedented rejection of the show from those determined not to see it...
So, here I was, looking at the wreckage of a franchise I have supported since childhood at the start of 2019.
The show in a terrible mess, worst series since the revival without doubt, the BBC in full damage control mode…
Then I start to learn what was going on over on social media:
It was as ugly as a Slitheen…
What I found was a fanbase that had been around for over 50 years being attacked and bullied on both Facebook and Twitter by organised “Pro-Jo” fans, pressured to shut up about the new show and go away, while SJW’s swarmed in, supporting the show because the Doctor was now a feminist sex fantasy with a rainbow plastered on her chest, all being co-ordinated by “leader” accounts who are clearly working to produce a new “Doctor Who COMMUNITY” to replace the Doctor Who fanbase with, that they can control and rigidly police. These people would have done well in the Communist Party of Stalin.
I also discovered the social media bragging chambers of these people and evidenced what I found there, then used that evidence to confront certain ring leaders on Twitter about what they were doing by calling them to account for their own words.
Their terror over being called out (after their monstrous ego’s made frankly amateur mistakes) led to them deleting a Facebook page with over 100K follows, and a wordpress account that was their special pride and joy, in order to hide their bragging about their real motives: an interesting reaction to being asked some simple questions about their own words. On the whole it was clear a large part of the “new fans” were now setting out to Police opinions about the show, and it had nothing to do with liking Doctor Who, in fact the leaders hate the show for its patriarchal past, and everything to do with the global march of intersectional fourth wave feminism.
What a mess!
Now in the year since, nothing especially has changed in the fanbase, positions were drawn, people who’ve loved the show all their lives aren’t going to be easily cowed by the toxic bigotry of radicalised kids, while those who identify with the show chiefly because of a rainbow on a pair of tits aren’t going to give an inch either, and its been a sad miserable year for the fanbase, when the best thing to genuinely get excited for is animated Troughton and a Colin Baker box set.
But in the wider picture, this greater Culture War that the BBC, in their incompetent mismanagement, decided to sail the franchise right into the middle of, has been going terribly for the SJW intersectionalists.
On the popular culture front, TV series like BatWoman and films like Terminator Dark Fate, Charlies Angels, and even the mighty Star Wars (not any more!) have all proved again and again and again that Go Woke = Go Broke, and when even Disney has to course correct so hard the SJW’s start attacking them for Rise of Skywalker “not being feminist enough” it is clear the zeitgeist is shifting and film investors will not tolerate continually losing money for the sake of a left wing identity politics that is being rejected across society.
Meanwhile the full weight of the SJW establishment, including the media, did their very best to sink “Joker” as a “problematic film”, whipping up hysteria it would incite violence… with the result of utter humiliation as Joker became the single most profitable super hero movie DC Comics has EVER EVER made. The “stamp our feet and scream” mentality has been losing the argument and finding the real limits of its influence throughout 2019.
Of course, things are different at the BBC. Because they are funded by the poor British population being threatened with Jail if they don’t pay for it, for decades the BBC has considered itself privileged above the rest of the TV industry, and they indulge ideology in their content because they don’t have to stop making it just because people don’t want it. That’s why forced diversity quotas to massively over-represent minorities in BBC programming has been forced into all BBC output.
But those days of arrogance are coming to a very rude abrupt stop…
After being “sausage processed” by the broadly Marxist education system, the majority of British Youth supported the hard left manifesto of the Labour Party at the General Election just held on December 12th 2019. These are the same people on Twitter who the BBC has courted and pandered to, not just with Doctor Who, but with much of its programming, especially over the last 5 years. And there is an object lesson here: The Labour Party comprehensively “won” Twitter during that election campaign. “likes” “shares” “comments” “engagements”, all backed Labour by a big margin, support for Labour overwhelming support for other parties on the platform. To the progressive Twitter verse, massive popularity was self-evident and a historic breakthrough Victory was coming…
Then Labour got smashed in the face and rejected by the electorate with its worst election result in 85 years, and all those moaning Remain-in-EU tosspots got told to do one too…
Causing a MASSIVE CULTURE SHOCK!
A perfect storm of conditions as Series 12 is about to be broadcast, with its radicalised left-wing writers doubling down on their “woke” mission (with some old monster membaberries thrown in to settle the fanbase a little to shut up and take it), in a national political climate where the left have just been massively rejected, Brexit is unstoppable, the Government is very unhappy with the BBC’s behaviour (as are a lot of other people!), Boris Johnson is about to decriminalise the TV Tax and 75% of Britons say the license fee must go…
How will more “Resolution” sour sneery mean-minded Brexit “jokes” go down with the general audience?
And with regard to the general audience, this is a vital point I really want to make clear:
The Doctor Who fanbase is the beating heart of the show, people who care about the show, support the show, and spend a lot of money of merchandise based on the show. At the height of the Tennant era, Who merch was estimated at over 100 mill a year. Hard figures aren’t easy to come by, but with the slowdown in interest reported from industry stockists, the “meh” reception of the Chibnall version of the series, general trends across society, plus evidence gathered of 13th Doctor stock on heavy discount, its clear that the current state of the franchise for Merch is abysmal.
But Doctor Who fans are NOT the whole Doctor Who audience!
Many fans have had criticism of series 11: but they are able to criticise it BECAUSE THEY STILL WATCHED IT!
It isn’t the fans who turned off, even as the series became a horror show, but the general public: the SAME general public who've just told the left extremism of Labour/LibDems/Remain and the BBC’s institutional bias to go do one that has empowered the strongest government since I was a teenager.
Society is going to significantly shift over the next five, probably 10 years… Leaving series 12, in the eyes of the huge audience it needs to recapture, looking at risk of coming across as a lingering bad smell just as the country wants to move forward into a new decade.
Series 12 will probably get off to a good start with its 2 parter: but that will only leave 8 episodes left in this truncated stunted version of the show: the best Chibs can make it, apparently (does he even WANT to make it?): and all TV shows have to build a relationship to retain their audience for strong series viewing figures. Most people will decide to stick with a show or watch something else by the 3rd or 4th episode.
So really, Doctor Who in its current form has until the end of January 2020 to prove itself. It’s too late to change anything, it’s too late to do anything, this is going to be received as its going to be received and the show will be in the state it’s in afterwards. In the world of mass audience psychology, some things are INEVITABLE.
Yes. I predict a shit-show!
Will Doctor Who survive?
Maybe. Don’t expect these writers to help the cause. The bottom line is the writers see the show as their platform for their activist agenda: and they care about their agenda far more than they give a damn about a "rotten symbol of the patriarchy" like Doctor Who. They would happily burn the show to the ground to make their point, because being “destroyed by the patriarchy” by getting the show cancelled after running daddy’s Porsche into a brick wall is just very “them”. They will be lauded by their peer group regardless.
I have reflected over recent months about what happened to the franchise: the problems go back further than the start of series 11.
Really, the show started to weaken itself from series 6 onwards. The Tennant era had been a triumph and Matt Smith had got off to a great start, but the scripts started to get a bit “up themselves”. Then series 7 got split in two, brought in the format breaking “most important companion ever” Clara, who went on to weigh down Capaldi’s first two seasons with that characters baggage, and more and more woke points creeping in until series 9’s finale ended up a sour taste in many fans mouths. Series 10 was a big pick up but finished a long way to go to regain that lost audience (a large part of which was to do with casting an older doctor when Capaldi replaced Matt Smith), no matter that Stephen Moffat had crafted his very best work to finish his run…
And then the BBC abandons any sense of making the show for everyone (Moffat is on record saying the show is not just for progressive liberals, but Brexit voters too, something he fought for and Chibs totally ignored) and serves up Chibnall, Whittaker and the dull preachy tokenism of series 11…
This legacy of the choices over the last few years has also resulted in a gradual weakening of the Doctor’s character that has become damaging to the essential character of the Doctor and the values of the show.
It is unthinkable that the classic Doctor could ever of been sexual with a companion, or any human being for that matter.
The Doctor is not just some bloke from around the corner, in fact he is very different, his true nature Alien, and a protector, not user and abuser, of humanity.
In the Tennant era, the whole point to the Doctor/Rose storyline was that it was a love that could never happen. That the Doctor knew it was WRONG to become romantic with the humans who keep him focused and help him care.
But that was 2006.
Now, in 2019, the woke invaders of the Doctor Who fandom do nothing but concoct sexual fantasies about characters, not just in Who but across franchises, “Shipping” characters for their erotic titillation, and the BBC has shown, as those who claim to be connected to the writing on social media also claim, that it is open to the Jodie Whittaker portrayal entering a lesbian relationship with the Pakistani Muslim character Yaz.
This may not happen, but it will be a disaster for Doctor Who if it does. The whole idea of this ancient alien being so unable to keep self control as to use a short lived limited human being for sexual pleasure is somewhere over the line of disgusting and smacks of an abusive relationship on a par with child sex abuse: it might go down well with the woke crowd, but it is a vile debasing of the character of the Doctor and the values of the show.
And again, the roots of this go deep, with Moffat planting various seeds, like putting the Tenth Doctor into at least an implied sexual relationship with Elizabeth the 1st in “Day of the Doctor” or the male to female regeneration shoe-horned into “Hell Bent” so badly in that the Doctor’s character has to be further bent out of shape, shooting a man in cold blood to make it happen.
Can Doctor Who be saved?
Maybe. Doctor Who has been in trouble before: but never in a circumstance where it’s the shows own production that has become toxic with an agenda against its audience. It’s going to depend how bad it gets before Chibnall, Whittaker and this extreme ideology gets ejected from the production to try to save the worlds longest running sci-fi franchise.
It may be that by the time we get there, there won’t be enough people left to care
The BBC are dashing series 12 out as fast as they can and by Mid-March, with no confirmed further production dates so far, series 12 will already be over and everyone can see exactly what we are dealing with and what the reaction will be. With the BBC under serious threat of extinction for pissing the people of Britain off way past one time to many, we are certainly in interesting times, and if the show takes cheap shots, the media WILL respond, creating damaging optics. But then that's going to happen anyway when analysis shows there is little prospect of gaining lost audience. Nothing brings the media down harder than the failure of a previously favoured cause...
You can be sure we will reconvene with a future article to see how this all works out…
Thankyou for your time reading the article: my best to all.
John The White.
