The inevitable Matt Smith post (slightly later than planned)

See, if there was ever a time when the idea of re-casting the Doctor as somebody other than a young white dude was likely to be taken seriously, it was during the search for Tennant’s replacement. Tennant is, crucially, the first Doctor who’s unquestionably been the focus of the series, both in terms of the character and the actor playing him. The idea of any other Doctor having a cross-dimensional affair with Madame de Pompadour would seem a ludicrous premise for a fanfic, let alone an actual televised episode, but post-Eccleston we’re supposed to accept whole stories revolving around the Doctor’s personal life as an integral part of the series, leaving the companion with… Well, exactly. Rose is remembered as the iconic new series companion not because she was the first or the longest serving, but because being paired with Eccleston’s tactless, brooding Doctor made sure that she had to carry thwacking great chunks of the narrative on her own. Paired with a Doctor who can do all the running, swordfighting and technobabble as well as be charming, sexy, approachable and capable of having tragic love affairs, on the other hand, she was surplus to requirements. So, in fact, was everybody else; Martha was only given things to do when the Doctor was either amnesiac or trapped in a dog kennel, and they didn’t even bother with Donna, who was explicitly pitched to us a “sidekick” rather than an identification figure (see especially “Forest of the Dead”, where they just stick her in a VR world for the entire episode while the Doctor figures out the mystery and saves everybody on his own).

This approach worked because Tennant’s performance was good enough to hold the stories together almost single-handed, but by the same token, over-reliance on the leading man meant that he’d be almost impossible to effectively replace. There are obvious parallels with Tom Baker’s departure here. Despite some astonishing cock-ups later on, producer John Nathan-Turner knew exactly what he was doing in 1980, and reasoned that giving the public Tom Baker 2.0 was never going to work out. A sub-par Baker clone would have been a disaster, but even if the perfect replacement bombastic loon were found, the comparisons to his predecessor would rob him of any chance of being seen as anything but a replacement. So, instead, he went for the deliberate contrast to Baker’s portrayal, and in Peter Davison we got a younger, quieter, vulnerable, curious Doctor. Aware that the series was reinventing itself, people who were curious or had simply gotten sick to death of Tom Baker’s shtick tuned in again, and the audience of his debut episode was almost twice that of Baker’s swansong. Eccleston was the same in 2005, since everybody was expecting a generic fantasy Englishman, and casting a dramatic heavy in a big leather coat proved that we didn’t know what to expect.

But the current series revolves far more around Tennant than the old series did around Baker. By the time of the great sea change, Baker was basically there to goon around and provide comic relief in stories that were too lightweight to need it in the first place, whereas the 2008 season gave us “Forest of the Dead”, an episode that relied largely on the audience’s interest in the Tennant-Doctor’s love life as its means of generating impact, and that’s only the most egregious example of late. A replacement who was also meant to be charming, sexy, approachable and haunted by failed love affairs would have, logically, been a bad move under these conditions because, with Tennant as a lead, the show took these aspects of the Doctor as far as they could reasonably go. The obvious replacement for Tennant, then, would be a grumpy, volatile bastard, which is why I briefly considered betting on Robert Carlyle. Except, hold on, something like that wasn’t reasonably going to happen, was it? After four years of Tennant himself being the drawcard, a lead who wasn’t instantly audience-friendly could easily doom the series.

Can you see what I was getting at in the first sentence, now? The anti-Tennant would be too much of  a risk to be plausible, while Tennant 2.0 would be too likely to backfire, so for those two months it seemed genuinely plausible that we might get a Doctor who wasn’t either white or male. A move like that would have allowed the production team to give us a Doctor who still fitted into the vaguely Tennant-shaped gap, but the break with tradition would have been a big enough shock to the system to stop his / her every waking moment being judged against Tennant. It would also open up whole new places for historical stories to go; all the Season 3 historicals managed to get varying degrees of mileage out of people’s attitude toward Martha, but there she had the white male Doctor to stick up for her. Take that away and you’ve suddenly got a lot more potential, because historical stories might be forced to address the social issues of their setting head on, rather than treating the past as somewhere to fight CGI witches. And since the whole four-dimensional romance aspect is starting to get more than a bit staid, having one of the Doctor’s former squeezes reunite with him only to discover he’s a woman now is one of the few things that could actually make this plot strand interesting again.

This is, of course, all academic now.

Matt Smith might well be the best actor to ever take on the role, but purely by virtue of him being a slightly odd skinny dude with hair like Tintin, he’s going to have a hard time distinguishing himself sufficiently from Tennant. It could work if, like Davison, Smith’s Doctor took a step back from the action and the series focused more on the people and places he visits. However, given that Smith’s era will be overseen by Steven Moffat, author of the most excessively Tennant-centric scripts in the series, this probably isn’t going to happen. On the plus side, he’s less likely to expect us to be surprised and delighted by aliens landing in contemporary London every fortnight.

Still, while we’re considering what might have been, let’s piss this guy off, if only hypothetically. Who would you want as a black female Doctor? My vote goes to Nisha Nayar:

For starters, she’s already been both versions of Doctor Who – “The Parting of the Ways” in the new series (coincidentally the same story as Patterson Joseph) and “Paradise Towers” in the old one (coincidentally the only tolerable story from 1987) -  so she’s clearly not averse to it. We know that she can engage with children, because she was a regular in Tracy Beaker and played Mowgli in an audio version of The Jungle Book. She was also in one of the Cracker specials (the good one), so there’s another Eccleston connection. I’m not sure how good she is at swordfighting or scaling buildings, but surely that’s what the companion’s supposed to do, yes? I also fancy her, but that’s beside the point.