You Were Expecting Someone Else: The Good Doctor

For once, then, the spinoff media feel like a plausible hope of quality. Of course, they exited the Moffat era in dire shape. Big Finish’s failures scarcely neet further elaboration, while the novel line spent a decade in gradual decline under the stewardship of the same guy who’d been editor for The Ancestor Cell. This meant that we were never going to see some Whittaker Era in Exile that offered a credible double to the main era. But it didn’t preclude outbreaks of quality. This was, after all, the line that had previously hired Michael Moorcock and Stephen Baxter. Good things could still happen.

And certainly the hiring of Juno Dawson qualifies. A successful young adult writer who penned This Book is Gay to the outrage of the good homophobes of Wasilla, Alaska before publicly transitioning. She is, in other words, the sort of author you’d actually expect a healthy Doctor Who novels line to commission: a reasonably hot writer who’s a big enough fan to be amused by the opportunity. (Dawson offers fond childhood memories of Time and the Rani, which is one of the most delightfully idiosyncratic versions of that anecdote as Doctor Who writers go.) This book was an unequivocal good sign in a year that had plenty of bad ones.

Because quality is an annoyingly foregrounded issue in this era, we may as well establish up front that this is pretty good. Dawson gets how to do this. The Good Doctor sits up there with Demons of the Punjab and, more cursedly, Kerblam! in actually providing a notion of how this could ever have worked. Which is a key piece of work for the long run accomplished. When some idiot in twenty or thirty years decides there’s room to do another big sprawling Doctor Who overview, The Good Doctor will play a key role in establishing the dissident “good” version of the Thirteenth Doctor era that got reconstructed in hindsight.

But that’s going to require hindsight. At the time of writing—early March, 2023 for the first draft of this—the Thirteenth Doctor era still stands out for having the absolute lowest number of decent stories of literally any era of Doctor Who. In part this is because of the dearth of spinoff material—there’s only a handful of other Thirteenth Doctor books besides this one, as once Richards retired from managing the line it largely withered, and so the era is still entirely dependent on the televised version, in much the same way that your only real options for non-televised Colin Baker stories in 1987 were Slipback and the Doctor Who Magazine comic. So while there clearly is a working model of Whittaker’s Doctor to concoct out of this, that doesn’t at present actually constitute a generally functional Whittaker era in the same way that early Big Finish did for Colin Baker.

So how did Dawson accomplish this? Well, the cynical and not entirely satisfying answer is that she did it by simply inventing the era from scratch. This book, after all, was released between Rosa and Arachnids in the UK, and so Dawson would have had essentially nothing to work from in terms of actual episodes, even before you get down to Chibnall’s pathological spoilerphobia and the question of how much of the existent material Dawson was given when she sat down to write the book. She’s described the process as having been a tremendous challenge, and she ultimately went off of relatively little, reasoning that “Bradley Walsh was going to be Bradley Walsh, in that when I’ve seen him act in other things he brings a lot of himself to his characters.” But she was elsewhere stymied in quite fundamental ways, including not knowing how actively Muslim Yaz was going to be and so being unable to write her engaging with the discussions of religious fundamentalism and sticking up for faith. As for Whittaker’s Doctor, she seems to have approached the task with little more than knowledge of what accent she’d be using, and so to have shrugged her shoulders and written a Yorkie version of Generic Doctor.

This is evident from the Doctor’s opening scene in the novel, which sees her attempting to end a war by appealing to a general’s better nature. She does this by walking around the rubble of a bombed out village, picking up a broken teacup. “Probably belonged to someone, don’t you think?” she muses. “From one of those homes, I should think. I wonder if it was someone’s favourite mug. I wonder if every morning, without fail, they’d wake up and make a lovely cup of tea in their favourite blue mug. I can’t start the day without a cup of tea in my favorite mug, can you?” It’s an effective set piece, well tailored to the rhythms of Whittaker’s speech, but fundamentally just as easy to imagine coming from Matt Smith or Sylvester McCoy. It’s a slightly harder sell from Capaldi’s Doctor, but even that’s less true of the later “Tell me, General Orryx, tell me, Captain Blaine: is there any good reason on this planet why all these people had to die? Well? I’m waiting!”

Certainly it’s not based on anything in the first couple of episodes, not least because it’s a moral stance of the sort Chibnall doesn’t especially like writing for the Doctor. Indeed, for all that it’s not a speech you can easily see Capaldi giving, it’s drawing far more on The Zygon Inversion than it is from any of the first couple of episodes that Dawson might have been given. (And given that Dawson arrives at the same “Graham is mistaken for the one in charge and the Doctor has to pretend to be his assistant” joke that Joy Wilkinson did in The Witchfinders, which was the sixth episode filmed, you can broadly assume she didn’t have any scripts from beyond block 2.)  And yet it works, and more to the point works for Whittaker’s specific Doctor. The focus on small domestic life—that “I can’t start the day without a cup of tea in my favorite mug”—isn’t just impressively well suited to the actual rhythms of Whittaker’s speech, it’s a savvy understanding of this Doctor’s comparatively smaller scale.

The story’s structure also anticipates Chibnall’s aesthetic intentions surprisingly well, in that it’s very much a remix of classic series themes. The basic setup of the Doctor and company leaving and returning to a planet centuries later when everything has gone terribly wrong is reworked from The Ark, as for that matter is the dynamic of two warring species and the shifting balance of power between the two settings. The actual content of the story, meanwhile, with an out of control fundamentalist religious order oppressing people, is the same basic Planet of Fire stuff that Chibnall flailed at with The Battle of Rabid Alfalfa, although Dawson wisely nicks the “a member of the TARDIS crew is mistaken as a god but a zealous priest is skeptical” dynamic from The Aztecs to spice it up. As with the Doctor’s character, Dawson is doing it better than Chibnall does, but she’s still attempting the same basic task.

This has its limitations, and they’re relatively clear. Most obviously, Dawson engages in the same tedious centrism that declares that the leader of the rebels (who are, I stress, a fucking slave race) is too extreme and bloodthirsty so that both sides have to compromise. Sure, Dawson makes the religious fundamentalist slavers worse, but it’s still the same bland “all extremism is bad” crap that gets you Kerblam!.

Although, again, all of these are ultimately just the sins of that damned Zygon Inversion monologue, which was so perfectly executed that it damned us to years of remakes. Which highlights another way of looking at what Dawson is doing, which was to cross the apparent sense of forward progress the show had in 2017 with the surface level readings of what Chibnall was setting himself up to do. This is the first thing in the Chibnall era to feel like a successor to, say, Thin Ice—something that’s mindful about being center-left, diverse family sci-fi instead of just done up in the trappings of reflexive diversity.

But in doing so, another aspect of the era’s core flaws becomes clear. We’ve already talked a lot about the notion of a female Doctor, and about Chibnall’s Davison revivalism of a more passive Doctor. Another key aspect, however, is that Whittaker is tasked with playing a much more childlike Doctor than we’ve had. Even Matt Smith, the previous record holder in this direction, cut his Doctor’s manic glee with a sense of weight and age. Whereas Whittaker is just playing a relatively infantilized Doctor. And Dawson picks up on this. That’s not especially surprising, because it’s one of the things about Whittaker’s Doctor that you could get off of little more than the publicity photo of her costume that dropped in November of 2017—a costume that always looked like a child slightly ineptly playing dressup.

There’s a case to be made that Doctor-as-child was always a mistake—the rotten spawn of how charming Tom Baker is when he delivers that “there’s no point in growing up if you can’t be childish sometimes” or of Patrick Troughton playing with the Daleks in Evil of the Daleks in much the same way that Kerblam! is the poison fruit of  the successful in its time Moffattian liberalism. Certainly childishness is the axis upon which the Matt Smith era began to go a bit wrong. There’s something to be said for the idea that part of the engine that makes Doctor Who work is the fact that the Doctor is sympathetic to children even as they’re not actually like a child—that this is why the show can function simultaneously as a children’s show and as an adult drama peer of Star Trek: Discovery that’s made by the same people who made Broadchurch, It’s a Sin, or Inside Man. Disrupt the balance, whether in the direction of making the Doctor too grimfaced or too childish, and the show falters.

But there’s a particular flavor of the error that comes in falling into this specific trap alongside the idea of the first female Doctor. It’s not that childish Doctors are unpopular—although ultimately Smith’s three years, for all that I’m quite partial to them, feel like the cracking of the new series’ imperial phase. But it is that childish Doctors are in a real sense lesser. If you put Whittaker next to Capaldi she is diminished, in the same way that Capaldi was enhanced in key ways by coming off the at times facile mania of Smith. At the end of the day, equating someone who was at the time the only female Doctor with being a literally more infantilized version of the character was an egregious and fundamental mistake.

And that comes through in Dawson’s book. Not, I stress, in any well-defined way that leads Dawson to a misstep. It’s more of a diffuse limitation on the book. As noted, Dawson does the exact same “the Doctor is the victim of sexism” thing Wilkinson independently arrived at, and in both cases it’s crap—a tedious plot device that serves only to delay advancement without offering any real pleasure. There’s a constant decision here to clip the wings of the first female Doctor in a way that has no actual advantages whatsoever, and a near infinitude of drawbacks.

In the end it’s impossible not to gesture backwards and look at the two prototypes of a female Doctor that the previous era produced. Missy, it’s fair to say, was childlike in key ways, but this was paired with an openly homicidal menace—a casually manic homicidal tendency that, it’s safe to say, counterbalanced the childishness. Clara, meanwhile, was a competent and domineering figure—a vision of the Doctor more rooted in Sylvester McCoy and David Tennant’s relative darkness, who was simply written as a character that it was impossible to dismiss as just a woman. This conscious counterweighting of any sort of childish glee—and let’s face it, Clara rarely played childish glee in the first place—was a fundamental part of what made a female Doctor work. Without them, and with a deliberate focus on childishness and passivity, the concept is fatally flawed—so much that even Juno Dawson can only make it work pretty well.