Controversy and Change: The Divide in Disney Doctor Who
Feature article by guest contributor Zachary Schulman.
Picture this: on the TARDIS stage, former showrunner Steven Moffat visits to speak with the returning showrunner, Russell T. Davies, for an interview segment of Doctor Who: Unleashed. At one point during the interview, RTD challenges our expectations as an audience by opening a discussion of Doctor Who’s genre: “—let’s stop pretending there’s any hard science fiction in this show. Look at this magical box, it’s just nonsense.” Even though RTD measures the heavier sci-fi elements of Moffat’s own episode, “Boom”, the returned showrunner makes a case for considering what’s changed about Doctor Who in recent years. While the show has never broken its promise to us of being a sci-fi/fantasy, we must be willing to discuss many of the controversial changes that have been happening to Doctor Who. If you understand the Disney genre, you will have a strong sense of where Doctor Who is going.
From witches and their nightsabers in Star Wars, to Marvel’s corporate-martial allegiances in our own world, recent projects realized by the Disney company have angered many people. Despite having disturbed audiences’ “precious moral scruples” in every political direction, the Disney company is still profiting from our engagement. Anger is proof of entertainment. Whether Doctor Who is financially sustained as a part of that future remains to be seen.
The Disney company’s role is evidently to amass intellectual properties as a de facto entertainment juggernaut, having significantly grown beyond the genre of its storytelling origins. Many audience members expect Doctor Who’s genre, or audience/author expectations, to be “hard science fiction”. The predominance of magic and superstition in the second RTD era works to push the sci-fi/fantasy series to new territories, but is this the reason for the divide among viewers?
New Who, the revival incarnation of Doctor Who that ran—according to BBC iPlayer—from 2005-2022, maintains that sci-fi/horror genre promise of Classic Who and has propelled the show to the global stage, “invading” the U.S. and many other countries. New Who, however, was not without its controversial changes, many of which coincide with the ratings decline of the show. The Disney genre is predominantly that of the promise of happiness for our protagonists, as well as that genre promise of empowerment opportunities. Disney Who, the latest incarnation of Doctor Who, has exhibited all of the previous shows’ genre qualities with its first season, while also choosing to sustain the colorful changes that have emerged by the end of New Who.
Why Not New Who?
In order to understand how Disney Who is a genre promise to a forward-thinking demographic cluster of Doctor Who’s considerable audience, we must look back to 2023. Just one week before the 60th Anniversary special “The Star Beast” premiered, the Children in Need 2023 special “The Fourteenth Doctor is Here!” surprisingly aired to considerable controversy. Namely, the uproar regarded the Dark Lord of Skaro’s new appearance. When I first saw the special, I enjoyed the look into what I presumed was the Dark Lord’s past, when Davros stood menacingly with his horrific aspirations. It wasn’t until after the viewing that I learned that this special is intended to retroactively change the continuity we’ve known to instead have Davros be an able-bodied man. While I’ll always hold bizarre affection for Julian Bleach’s New Who Davros, I realized at that moment that we were in a new era of the show.
Beyond Disney’s first season reset, and beyond BBC iPlayer’s distinction between Doctor Who (1963-1996), Doctor Who (2005-2022), and Doctor Who [(2023-)], the show itself has changed considerably enough to warrant a new name that’s neither Classic Who nor New Who. Concerns have been brought up about the “Disneyfication” of Doctor Who. The mountain-load of associations that different communities have with the Disney conglomerate have only continued to pile up in every direction. It took the 60th Anniversary event itself and the Disney deal to regenerate Doctor Who after critical series rating drops towards the end of New Who. Although the number of Disney+ episode viewings comprise a dataset that is missing from the public record, the available ratings of Doctor Who in the U.K. have not increased. Disney’s kept private the data on viewings of The Mandalorian, though that show’s enduring merchandise empire evinces ideal, long-lasting success. It’s going to take a lot of content and media saturation to get Doctor Who’s viewing momentum up to the point where it was for the 50th Anniversary, and—challengingly—the world has changed greatly in the past decade.
Disney Who is a genre promise to represent new communities by granting them the spotlight. The Fourteenth Doctor, the last Doctor seen in New Who and the first to be featured in Disney Who, had been written by RTD in “Wild Blue Yonder” to be gay. The Fifteenth Doctor is played by a (self-attributed by Ncuti Gatwa) queer Rwandan-Scottish actor, and he falls in love with Jonathan Groff’s Rogue using a romance genre style new to Doctor Who. Disney’s incarnation gives audiences an on-brand musical episode with “The Devil’s Chord”, featuring the show’s first ever drag queen villain. The Sixteenth Doctor will likely make use of the bi-generation TARDIS’ accessibility ramp as seen at the end of “The Giggle”. Ever since an alternately-abled incarnation of the Doctor was envisioned by RTD in his novelization of “Rose”, consider the prominent inclusion of Ruth Madeley’s Shirley Bingham and Lenny Rush’s Morris Gibbons in Davies’ second era, along with the Disney promise, as signals to the future of Doctor Who. In their SMA community article for bionews.com, Sherry Toh celebrates the milestones of “disability representation” in the new series. It would be fantastic for Doctor Who to keep showcasing such empowerment stories, and it would be sensible to strengthen the connections that the show has with other realms.
Disney Who in the Multiverse of Madness
Davies has recently spoken about the influence he samples from Star Wars, concerning Ruby Sunday’s “Dickensian” origin. While Davies connects more with Rian Johnson’s version of Star Wars, one that depicts the sequel trilogy protagonist Rey as an orphan from a truly anonymous lineage, Ruby Sunday’s origin isn’t the only major influence from Disney that emerges in the “Empire of Death” finale.
Having the first season villain of Doctor Who “dust” everyone in the universe is a strong narrative connection to Disney’s Marvel. Feasibly, the idea is to have the younger audience members see that there are connections between one Disney realm and another. Envision viewers transferring deeply held associations from the Avengers movies to Doctor Who, just as aspects of the Star Wars sequel trilogy were written to take after Marvel (especially the lines in Episode IX: “I am all the Sith” and “And I am all the Jedi” paralleling the climactic “I am inevitable” and “And I am Iron Man” lines from Endgame). Think back on how Maestro and the Fifteenth Doctor had a musical battle the likes of the magical duel between Doctor Strange and Sinister Strange in Multiverse of Madness. Perhaps an alternately-abled Sixteenth Doctor will be a Professor Charles Xavier type, strengthening associations with the relatively new to Disney X-Men franchise—associations including the divergent portrayals of Mutants as that of the uncanny folk of our world.
While Daleks have been surprisingly absent from the live action narratives of Disney Who, the inevitable return of the Doctor’s greatest enemy will likely continue what the 2023 Children in Need special started with re-presenting Davros as an able-bodied Kaled supremacist. The Dark Lord’s new look, that of a banal, fascist man, is scary in its own right. Setting such a villain against an alternately-abled incarnation of the Doctor could provide us with a powerful empowerment narrative against bigotry.
However—and problematically—Disney employs a genre that undoes genocide with a snap of one’s fingers. Bringing “death to death”, or using a Nano Gauntlet powered by Infinity Stones to resurrect the dead is part of the Disney genre promise of magical, happy endings. Of course, our world doesn’t have that genre promise, but that’s what stories are for. Long before the Disney contract, Doctor Who’s solution to cataclysmic problems has often been to reverse them while minimizing the lasting consequences to the point where the actual damage done by episode’s end is far less than what was possible if not for the magic of the Doctor. The pulls between fantasy and sci-fi don’t really define the genre divide that audiences are currently, and have been, experiencing.
Generational Genres
The real divide in Disney Who is that of generational time. The producers have planned to target future generations as viewers of Doctor Who—generations who will not have known a time before the internet, their minds continually swimming (or drowning) in an ocean of ideas that they’ll manifest and use/be used to shape the world with, à la “Dot and Bubble”. I have been watching Doctor Who for nearly twenty years. Many have been watching Doctor Who since the last century. We’ve all seen Doctor Who change. Above all, Doctor Who teaches us how to accept change.
To let the idea of the Doctor go, and to “just see [them]” for who they are is a worthwhile intention. In one of the fulfilling scenes that Rian Johnson added to canon in Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Master Yoda’s Force ghost teaches Luke Skywalker that “We are what they grow beyond.” We’ve had our time, and now it’s time to make space for the future. To the many who don’t feel connected to the aforementioned sentiment, letting go is unacceptable.
The question, then, is how to maintain the legacy of Doctor Who, and the passing of that legacy, in a way that respects those who have watched before while meeting the escapist needs of those who are starting to watch now? In reality, as in any good compromise, neither side gets everything they wanted. It seems that in Disney Who the Fourth and the Seventh Doctors’ encounters with Sutekh in Big Finish’s extended Classic Who era didn’t happen, just as the Sixth Doctor’s Lost Story “The Nightmare Fair” was unfortunately retconned by “The Giggle” in 2023. It’s delightful to see the canonizing of the Memory TARDIS, from Tales of the TARDIS, in the season finale, just as the current production team is trying to strengthen the connections between all forms of Doctor Who media.
The 2023 Children in Need special even matches up with Doctor Who Magazine’s presentation of the first canonical Fourteenth Doctor story “Liberation of the Daleks”, with the comic’s cliffhanger leading right into the controversial Davros retcon. The fact that “The Star Beast” anniversary special loosely comes from an earlier edition comic strip of the same magazine (once named Doctor Who Weekly) speaks to the paratextual marketing strategy that Disney is employing to bridge the divide. Look at the return of the 70s logo! Despite scrambling canon, these connections serve the need of getting Doctor Who’s viewership momentum going again by connecting new viewers to the show’s actual history. As long as the original content continues to be propagated, the show’s legacy lives on.
Furthermore, the dashing Rogue, named after a character archetype from the decades-old D&D (a gaming property owned by Hasbro) is an exciting Universes Beyond inclusion in Disney Who. The trading card game Magic: The Gathering— “the original you might say”—is yet another Hasbro property that the BBC’s made dealings with, having authorized the printing of the extremely fun Doctor Who expansion that I’ve been playing the hell out of since before the 60th Anniversary specials, last October. For generations, the role-playing community has often been a haven for the many divergent members of our society, and connecting to that love is a wise move.
Disney Who Unbound
If Doctor Who is to survive, as its relative sci-fi/fantasies Star Wars and Star Trek are, the show must be geared to a new generation of viewers who will see changes that previous audiences might not be able to accept. Disney Who, a name that exists to focus on representing the problems that younger viewers care about most, has happened. Classic Who, New Who, and Disney Who—a never-ending story has many iterations, and even more interpretations. “An Unearthly Child” was not originally intended to lead to the Time War. Series 1 (2005) was not originally intended to lead to the Flux. Nevertheless, Doctor Who’s future is charted towards forever.
Now, as the main block of Season 1 has concluded, the outro Christmas special is all that’s left of the Fifteenth Doctor’s first series. It seems likely that the Christmas special will reveal another member of the Whoniverse Pantheon. If Mrs. Flood ends up being the consequence of the First Doctor’s “mistake” to leave Susan Foreman behind, then the plot of the 2024 Christmas special has been brewing since 1964’s “The Dalek Invasion of Earth”. While the northern hemisphere’s summer has only just begun, the winter forecast according to Mrs. Flood already heralds that the Doctor’s story “ends in absolute terror.” At this point, even when considering all that we’ve seen, who knows what will happen?
