New Dimensions REPRESENTATION AND ALLEGORY IN DOCTOR WHO

There is a war going on right now in popular culture. Radicalised, partisan factions of various fandoms are using their internet megaphones in what they perceive as a life-or-death struggle to save the souls of their beloved franchises. A trailer for the all-female Ghostbusters (Paul Feig, 2016) became the most-disliked movie promo on YouTube,¹ while orchestrated campaigns saw Star Wars: The Last Jedi (Rian Johnson, 2017), which featured an unusually diverse cast for the franchise, suffer improbably low user ratings on the Internet Movie Database and Rotten Tomatoes.² Most recently, Rotten Tomatoes had to change its review algorithms after Captain Marvel (Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck, 2019), the first Marvel Comics film to be led by a female hero, was bombarded with negative reviews by users before the film had even been released.³

At the heart of these extreme reactions to blockbuster films is a battle between conservatives and progressives – or ‘fanboys’ and so-called ‘social justice warriors’ (SJWs) – as ferocious as any contemporary US political division. Fanboys, echoing similar arguments trumpeted during the ‘Gamergate’ affair,⁴ want to preserve the integrity of science fiction by keeping politics out: they see their own position as being politically neutral – as if such a position were possible in a highly politicised, partisan environment. On the other side, the SJWs – a pejorative term – are explicitly political, reflecting a long-held view that all art is inherently informed by (and informs) its sociopolitical context. Broadly speaking, they argue that science fiction (and every other aspect of popular culture, for that matter) should reflect a more diverse reality – and, of course, align with a worldview that better reflects their own.⁵

The latest front in this war of imagined worlds is the long-running British science fiction series . The Archduke Ferdinand moment? The casting of a woman – namely, actor Jodie Whittaker – as the first female incarnation of the titular Time Lord. Fanboys see this unprecedented move as proof that SJW politics has infected yet another of their favourite properties.