The 13th Doctor is a woman.

22 minutes ago, PRIMEVAL said:

As long as she's a good Doctor, it's whatever. I just hope it isn't forced like a certain movie mentioned previously.

Yeah, exactly. The new Ghostbusters didn't suck because it had a female cast, it sucked because it just wasn't funny. Period. It was so tastelessly done, which made the female cast feel like a forced marketing gimmick. To be honest, Ghostbusters didn't need a remake anyway. Hollywood is simply running out of ideas, so they rehash old things with a twist that they know will generate controversy and turn heads. Much like Call of Duty games.

There's nothing wrong with female protagonists, but it doesn't excuse shitty writing either. This could just be a desperate attempt to rejuvenate ratings and nothing more.

I mean, Samus Aran and Ripley are fantastic female protagonists. Why? Because they star in great roles. Quality products, with good writing/gameplay.

And that's what matters most at the end of the day. The writing. Looks shouldn't matter, but they also kind of do (lol). Because hormones (damn you). Just look at every Michael Bay movie. No substance whatsoever, but sooo much eye candy... and that sells.

I don't think I've ever seen an episode of Doctor Who. Is it something you folks would recommend? 

16 minutes ago, RUSH said:

I mean, Samus Aran and Ripley are fantastic female protagonists. Why? Because they star in great roles. Quality products, with good writing/gameplay.

:\

What kind of monster doesn't like Alien or Metroid? D:

Oh I love Alien and Metroid both, I just disagree with holding Samus up as a female character "done right"- same with Ripley at least in the first Alien. I just don't feel holding those two flat characters up as good examples. Not trying to pass judgement on you- many others have made much worse arguments for those two and it almost counts as a trigger warning for me. 

2 hours ago, Gez said:

William Hartnell is the only Doctor; all others are impostors.

Although I enjoyed quite a few Doctors, Hartnell will always be on my top favourites. I don't know exactly what I like about him. Maybe it is that his mood shifted a lot in the show. One time he was a grumpy old man and the other he was excited like a child, upon discovering something.

Anyways, about the woman Doctor, I am not angry, though I am not happy either. We had so many Doctors being men, in a row and it kinda feels weird to me. The whole thing is one of the riskiest moves I have seen in TV and I don't know if experimenting at this point in time is a good idea. If it happened earlier, when the show's impact was smaller, I wouldn't have been so troubled.

However, blindly hating on the new Doctor seems unacceptable to me. RELAX PEOPLE!!! She is a human being, just like all of us, she appears to be a great fan of the series and she has some limits, as a person. I surely wouldn't want to start playing such a role, with hate at my side, so I wish for her to have courage and the best of luck, in what she is about to do. And heck, she might be one of the best things that happened to the role recently.

Also, we haven't seen her <<tricks>> yet. Like every new Doctor, she is to be hated at the start and loved afterwards. So, I am just hoping that the plot is excellent as always and that her new adventures will be fun to watch. Everything else can be put to the side.

I stopped watching after Matt's run as Doctor, I should really catch up with it.

As for the whole female Doctor thing I for one don't see it being anything bad and as an interesting plot point they could mess around with the idea of the Doctor being unrecognised by former friends/foes due to how dramatic the change was (which is something I felt should've been common throughout due to regens).

This has been teased for so long that I feel like it's about damn time. As long as the character is intact and the writing is good, nobody should really mind that the Doctor is female next.

I've liked all of the choices from Eccleston to Capaldi, I have good faith that the producers know what they are doing and picked Whittaker for being able to do the job well.

1 hour ago, Piper Maru said:

I don't think I've ever seen an episode of Doctor Who. Is it something you folks would recommend? 

Yes 

3 hours ago, Piper Maru said:

I don't think I've ever seen an episode of Doctor Who. Is it something you folks would recommend? 

It depends. I would say that 2005 - 2010 had the best episodes of the new series. But I would suggest starting with episodes from either series 1, 2, or maybe 5. Series 1 will forever be my favorite. If you are into older tv shows, seasons 12 - 18 are generally seen as the best because those were the seasons of the "fourth doctor", who most people consider the best incarnation. It all kind of depends on the incarnation themselves because they are all different from each other in someway, and writers come and go. So the Fourth is the best of the older TV show, the tenth is typically seen as the best for the newer one.

If you are looking for a single episode in particular, I can't really think of one other than "Blink" of series 3. Scary as hell and an interesting watch.

^{BTW; The old TV show from the 60's to the 80's went by "Seasons" and when it came back in 2005 they went by "Series". There are 26 seasons, one movie, and currently 10 series.}

Aren't the old series like partially lost or something? Is it even possible to watch them?

Concerning Classic Who, pretty much every serial from the Third Doctor on exist in their entirety. Even in the case of the First and the Second Doctors, which have missing episodes or sometimes entire serials, the fans recorded the audio of those episodes back in the day, so at least from an audio standpoint every episode exists...which is more than can be said for some shows out there...

49 minutes ago, Memfis said:

Aren't the old series like partially lost or something? Is it even possible to watch them?

I know this was a while ago but they had at least four incarnations worth of full seasons on netflix. Maybe more. I'm not sure where else to find them, but it is possible to watch them some where.

That was more likely to be Hulu. Netflix never had full runs of Classic Doctors. Six was skipped entirely.

54 minutes ago, Memfis said:

Aren't the old series like partially lost or something? Is it even possible to watch them?

A few episodes from the first and secod Doctors are lost, yes, but everything from the third onward is still available in some way.

8 hours ago, Mr. Freeze said:

>Women do something

>Alt-Righties scream in anger

 

Sounds about right 

>15 likes

that was too easy lol. 

As long as it doesn't mess up the established lore, and the actress is good, I don't see the problem.

Personally, I always associated the Doctor with an older man, since he's supposed to have tons of knowledge and life experience. Maybe an older woman will work too. As long as they don't cast some young babyfaced goofball; I know fans of the show love David Tennant, but I personally got tired of his ADHD fits fairly quickly, and he was overall too young for the part.

Character gender is irrelevant IMO, unless the character is specifically stated to be a certain gender and meant to be that gender at all times. Performance and delivery of the character is far more important in the end.

8 hours ago, RUSH said:

What kind of monster doesn't like Alien or Metroid? D:

I don't like Metroid. Fight me.

I've been a Doctor Who fan since I was a kid in the '80s, and I think it's a great move.

A lot of people aren't familiar with the full history of Doctor Who. It's a show that has constantly, ruthlessly reinvented itself, experimented and changed. I guess you can't really have a 50 year run without doing so, really. Often the change comes with a new actor taking over the role of The Doctor, but just as often it's the producer of the show that has the bigger influence. A couple of really good examples are the Second -> Third Doctor transition in 1970, another is where the Eleventh Doctor took over in 2010. In both cases the change in Doctor was also accompanied by a change in show producer, and for each it's a massive ground-shift in the feel of the show, almost like a reboot, or like you're watching a different show entirely that just happens to share some common elements.

Why do I bring this up? Not only is Peter Capaldi leaving at the end of this year, but show producer Steven Moffat is, too. We're about to see another one of these ground-shifts / reboots take place, and Doctor Who is about to reinvent itself. Again, this is a good thing. Change, renewal and rebirth are part and parcel of the series, and the times where it hasn't been great are the times when it hasn't been bold enough to experiment and really shake things up. In particular I think the current show has become stale and predictable - Steven Moffat's run has gone on for too long, and this change is way overdue.

So a lot of people seem to be angry about this change because they think the Doctor has to be a male role, it's always been a man before so I guess it's hard to imagine a woman portraying the role? To me it's the wrong way of looking it. Regardless of whoever was going to take over from Peter Capaldi, the show is about to be rebooted. If you can imagine a show with a woman as the lead character, then you can imagine Doctor Who with a female Doctor. All bets are off as to what the new Doctor Who will be like, but I have high hopes!

On 7/16/2017 at 1:46 PM, Ajora said:

I like Dr. Who, but haven't seen more than maybe about 25 episodes. I wasn't sure if Time Lords could regenerate into different genders, but now I know that they can. And with that, I don't see anything wrong with this. I also don't find anything the least bit surprising about it.

Yes, they've gone out of their way to establish that this is possible over a period of years. Back in 2011 they had an episode that mentioned a Time Lord called The Corsair who had been both male and female. In 2014 they introduced Missy, a female regeneration of The Master. Finally in 2015 they depicted the on-screen regeneration of a Time Lord general from a white man into a black woman.

On 7/16/2017 at 8:35 PM, Memfis said:

Aren't the old series like partially lost or something? Is it even possible to watch them?

Some of the very earliest stories from the First and Second Doctors are partially or entirely missing - see here for some information. There were a few Third Doctor episodes which for a time were only available in black-and-white, but I think those have been colorized now. But from the Third onwards it's all available. Even though episodes are missing, the audio from the episodes survives - it's just the film that's missing. Some of the stories have been reconstructed by combining the audio with animation - Power of the Daleks was re-released last year like this.

On 7/16/2017 at 5:36 PM, Mr. Freeze said:

Oh I love Alien and Metroid both, I just disagree with holding Samus up as a female character "done right"- same with Ripley at least in the first Alien. I just don't feel holding those two flat characters up as good examples. Not trying to pass judgement on you- many others have made much worse arguments for those two and it almost counts as a trigger warning for me. 

At the risk of sidetracking the conversation, I'll begrudgingly agree with you here. I would like to see more complex characters (across the gender spectrum) in mainstream media; however, when it comes to "minority" characters like women (51% minority, lol), writers seem to struggle between writing them straight up, with either no reference to this identity differentiater, or with many overt references to the impact of this one identifier on the narrative.

When you're dealing with the "default" type of protagonist for your genre (male, straight, white (in that order)), no one really bats an eye. Introduce anything other than this, and it becomes un/intentionally political.

It's kind of like discussing evolution with deniers around: There are plenty of nuanced topics and debates within the field, but if anyone takes issue with the core premise, then it turns into this dumb good/bad, true/false, black/white political bullshit binary discussion.

---

Re the new doctor. I have no strong opinions yet. I haven't been happy with the intro of some of the other doctors in the past, but grew to like most of them. So I've learned to wait and see. More interested about the new staff in charge of creative direction than anything (as @fraggle pointed out above).

Well it's about time I check this show out.  A lot of people I know watch it and I hear it's really good.

1 hour ago, fraggle said:

Finally in 2015 they depicted the on-screen regeneration of a Time Lord general from a white man into a black woman.

This one is a little different because the General was a female for most of the regenerations. It wasn't until this past one (the one we saw starting with Day of the Doctor) where it was a male, and in Hell Bent, he just changed back to a female. This also means that we could see old Time Lords come back in any form, like the Rani or Romana as a male. It would also make leaking such things a lot harder. I mean, when Missy first revealed herself as the Master, it was a tremendous shock and a total surprise akin to "I am your father". People kept thinking that it was going to be the Rani, but nope.

On 16/07/2017 at 6:34 PM, Jaxxoon R said:

The Doctor becoming a woman was something they threw around as far back as the first or second regeneration, but never actually went through with it for whatever reason. It was only a matter of time before they used up every other variation of "weird smarty British person."

Well, we've yet to have an Asian [1] Doctor, although this gives me hope (and doubtless the deplorables will be outraged over that, too, which will warm the cockles of my heart).

[1] Brits already know this, but most non-Caucasian Britons are Asian, perhaps connected to all the years we spent nicking people's countries there.

This show has been in existence forever. It's not a matter of pure chance they decided to pick a female lead. Go re-watch the original doZen (12) seasons if you truly require closure.

Girls rule, women are funny. Get over it.

^^^^^^^^^^ Cartman couldn't have said it any better (or differently)