Doctor Who 60th Anniversary Special Mocks David Tennant with Identity Politics
Turkey Day is over, so it’s time to switch to cooking goose, and Doctor Who’s is in the oven. The Doctor Who 60th Anniversary Special debuted the first of its three episodes on Disney+ on Saturday, and it’s what a lot of people probably expected if the scenes making the rounds on Twitter are any indication. (And even if it’s just these two scenes, they’re more than enough.) They feature a woman and a trans person lecturing, berating, and sneering at David Tennant, one of the most popular versions of the title character, for being white, a man, a heterosexual, and not transgender. You can watch the clips below, courtesy of Twitter users @Christo08679133 and @NewsM101, if your eyes haven’t rolled in a while and you want to exercise them:
#RIPDoctorWho pic.twitter.com/cBNAgrnsF6
— pher (@Christo08679133) November 25, 2023
#RIPDoctorWho, there's no coming back. The franchise is dead. This is enough cringe to kill a pack of elephants. pic.twitter.com/HlfrxHffVL
— Memology 101 (@NewsM101) November 26, 2023
On a personal level, I don’t have a dog in this fight because I’m not a Doctor Who fan. Once, when I was in England, it was on in the background while I was visiting friends; that’s the most experience I have with it. (If you want a fan’s perspective, Nerdrotic and Heel vs. Babyface have you covered.) But whether or not we’re a fan of the particular property in any given case, we all know how this goes by now, and I sympathize with Doctor Who fans. You can tell they brought back David Tennant just to tear him down and use him as a punching bag for identity politics, and it sucks for the people who love the character and the performance. And this is not an inadvertent side effect of their efforts to make a great Doctor Who story; this is a deliberate middle finger to their fans. Nobody thinks this is entertaining. Not a single person involved in this special honestly believed Doctor Who fans would like it. This was a thrown snowball over the reaction to Jodie Whittaker’s female Doctor, a finger-wagging “Ack-shoo-uh-lee, she’s way better than David Tennant, manbabies!” It’s also letting the audience for this show know that it’s not for them anymore. Hopefully, they respond in kind. And is it a big surprise that Disney is involved in this? They’re embracing South Park’s “Put a chick in it; make her gay” label, or at least proving them correct as the movies and shows they had in the can roll out.
Sorry, Doctor Who fans; unfortunately, we’ve all been there.
