Gosh, a Doctor Who post! Whatever has prompted this?
Well, I have absolutely nothing to say on the subject of Matt Smith. However, over at Biology in Science Fiction Peggy asks whether there are any good scientific reasons why the new Doctor could not have been black or female. On the gender issue, she’s unusually lightweight, pointing only to a Wikipedia article that claims all of a Time Lord’s cells regenerate during the process of growing a new body.
If you are one of those people who thinks that determining sex is easy then perhaps you’ll be happy with this, but actually it should have been a marvelous opportunity to explore some of the weirdnesses of human biology.
There are, as I understand it, over 70 different intersex conditions currently recognized by science. The Intersex Society of North America lists many of them. One that I would particularly like to highlight is Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome. This affects around 1 in every 20,000 people. What happens to these folks is that the cells of their bodies are “male” – that is they contain XY chromosomes – but due to a problem recognizing androgen, a masculinizing sex hormone, their bodies look to be those of normal females. Someone with AIS will almost certainly be declared to be a girl at birth, but they have no uterus or fallopian tubes, so they can’t get pregnant.
So actually it is entirely possible for something to go wrong with the creation of human bodies and make them look female even though they have XY chromosomes. Obviously Time Lords are aliens, but they might suffer from similar problems. Goodness only knows what sort of gender identity problems they might have as a result.
I’m not an avid Dr. Who fan, so I was mostly indifferent to the news of a new doctor.
I’m sure Matt Smith is a fine actor and capable of playing the part. But I thought the choice of another white, young, British actor was an entirely safe, and in fact, rather boring choice.
The doctor could regenerate as *any* race – I can’t see any reason why not. The regeneration aspect of the Doctor is a brilliant stroke of genius for the series, allowing it to endlessly re-invent itself. Most shows would kill to have such a inherent mechanism for change and transformation. It could have been a woman. Technically, they could do anything with the doctor.
Of course, we should remember that this is a children’s show that has become incredibly popular, and I suspect the Beeb is cautious about radical changes that might alienate (ha!) their audience.
We can only hope the next time the doctor renews the BBC demonstrates a little more courage and foresight and really seizes the opportunity for change.
Well, a careful viewing of Gallifrey-based episodes in search of Time Lords of quasi-non-Caucasian ethnicity has so far turned up absolutely none. Which is hardly surprising, because in the days when the episodes I’ve seen were made the programme makers would have been startled, not to say amused, at the suggestion that a fictitious alien race would need representatives of all Earth’s ethnic groupings bunged in for fear that one of them might be offended*. A fair deduction from observational data gathered so far, therefore, is that the gene pool from which the Doctor originated comes in one colour only, which deduction would also be supported by the fact that the overwhelming majority of his regenerations have been to a quasi-Caucasian ethnotype.
I am at this point unable to check out “The Five Doctors” or “Arc Of Infinity”, though, so conclusions at this point are tentative at best. An Inuit Doctor could be only one regeneration away…
*I am all for political correctness in the highest degree, where it matters. This is an area where it really does not.