Matt Smith was not the first Doctor I watched, but he was the first Doctor that I started watching live, and he sort of accidentally became my Doctor. When I thought of the Doctor, he was the Doctor I imagined. He was the Doctor I quoted, and he was the Doctor I cosplayed. But in recent episodes I’d become increasingly uncomfortable with the kind of person my Doctor was becoming. I’d hoped “The Time of the Doctor” would be a return to and celebration of the Doctor I’d originally loved. Unfortunately, it was a compilation of all the worst traits the Eleventh Doctor has displayed, and all of the most problematic tropes about women which have been employed repeatedly during Steven Moffat’s tenure as showrunner. Even Matt Smith’s moving speech and Karen Gillan’s surprise return as Amy Pond couldn’t save this episode.

It’s taken me quite a while to write this post because I honestly couldn’t bring myself to even begin addressing the myriad of problems in this episode. Say what you like about Russell T. Davies, he sure wasn’t a saint and his scripts did occasionally employ problematic tropes, but his scripts weren’t as openly and unapologetically misogynistic as Moffat’s have become. It’s as if Moffat created a list of all the complaints his episodes have elicited and decided to provoke every single one of those again in this episode.

So, with great reluctance, below the jump is my review of “The Time of the Doctor.”

The Aggressive Sexualization of the Doctor

The primary comedic conceit of the episode was the extended nudity gag, though it seemed less like a joke you would expect to find in a family television show and more like a contrived plot device you’d expect to find in an unapologetically smutty fanfiction: “The Doctor and Clara have to go to church, but this church has a surprise dress code- nudity! It may look like they’re wearing clothes, but every time they get close Clara is reminded that they most definitely are not. Rating: Adult.”

It was hard to tell what exactly the point of the gag was. If it was supposed to be fanservice, it wasn’t much. After all, most of the time they were supposedly “naked” they were actually clothed. It also seemed at times like the point of the gag could’ve been that it would be funny for a church to require nudity as opposed to conservative dress, but that’s pretty weak.

Most of the time, it seemed as if the punchline of the joke was that people were uncomfortable with nudity, and the Doctor was totally unaware of that. This was at best juvenile and awkward, and at worst creepy and disturbing. It’s extremely hard to believe that after a thousand years of travel through time and space, including a significant period of time on contemporary Earth, that the Doctor would be entirely unaware that it is considered inappropriate to walk around in the nude in contemporary Britain. The Doctor wouldn’t have dared try to pull this with Rose, Martha, or Donna’s families. At one point, the punchline of the nudity joke was that Clara was uncomfortable discovering that all members of the papal mainframe were trained to see through holographic clothes and that dozens of people had just viewed her completely naked. So after being uncomfortable with the idea of walking around nude, she was given assurances that she would appear to be clothed using holograms, only to find out that it actually didn’t do anything and that she’d just been viewed totally naked without her express knowledge or consent. This is not funny. It’s creepy, disturbing, and trivializes an extreme violation of Clara’s trust and ability to consent.

There’s also something disturbingly aggressive about the Doctor’s actions in “The Time of the Doctor." The Doctor seems downright gleeful to have shocked Clara with his nudity when she enters the TARDIS, without any concern that she might be uncomfortable. This can’t be hand-waved away by saying that the Doctor is a strange alien unaware that his actions are inappropriate because had he pulled that with Donna she would’ve smacked him so hard he would’ve regenerated into Peter Capaldi right there and then.

But wait, many of you are probably asking, didn’t Donna see the Doctor naked in "Journey’s End”? Yes she did, but when we compare the scenes we get to the crux of why this nudity gag was bothersome. In “Journey’s End” there was a real, legitimate reason for the Doctor to appear naked. His hand was growing into an entirely new body, and regeneration doesn’t grow new clothes for you! Donna points this out to the newborn Doctor, the Doctor immediately puts on some clothes so that Donna doesn’t feel uncomfortable. The audience laughs at the irony that Donna, who of all the New Who companions probably ties with Mickey for having the least interest in seeing the Doctor naked, is the companion present at that moment, but we aren’t being invited to laugh because the Doctor deliberately and knowingly put her in a situation where she’d feel uncomfortable.

But there is absolutely no reason for the Doctor to be naked in “The Time of the Doctor.” The “church” excuse was so blatantly contrived to put the Doctor and Clara in a situation that can be sexually construed, and the audience is being invited to laugh at the fact that the Doctor is continuing to put Clara in uncomfortable situations long after she’s made it clear to him that she feels uncomfortable.

The episode doesn’t get much better from here. When Clara introduces the Doctor to her family as her boyfriend he slaps her ass, because that’s apparently the only way he knows how to make it clear to her family that he is pretending to take a romantic and sexual interest in Clara. And then later in the episode he forcibly kisses Tasha Lem and dismisses her protests, which I’ll discuss more in depth below.

It’s quite disturbing to see the Doctor treat the women around him in this way, and almost impossible to reconcile this Doctor with the men who came before him.

Cookie Cutter Characters and Trivializing Assault

Amy is sexy, feisty, and totally wants the Doctor. River is sexy, feisty, and totally wants the Doctor. Clara is sexy, feisty, and totally wants the Doctor. Queen Elizabeth is sexy, feisty, and totally wants the Doctor. So to mix things up a bit, Moffat created Tasha Lem, a female character who is sexy, feisty, and totally wants the Doctor.

But the problem with Tasha Lem’s character extends far beyond Moffat’s apparent inability to break his cookie cutter mold for female characters. Nearly every interaction the Doctor has with Tasha is sexualized. Tasha invites the Doctor on board the papal mainframe with a crooked finger and a “come hither” smile. When Tasha, Clara, and the Doctor first meet, Tasha admires the Doctor’s body and asks him to twirl for her; the audience later learns that she is able to see through his holographic clothing at this point. She then brings the Doctor back into her private “chapel” and informs him about the situation on the planet below while attempting to seduce him over a bed-shaped altar, as if the Doctor is suddenly incapable of listening to what a woman in power is saying if she isn’t also seducing him.

At this point, the problem isn’t just that Moffat’s women are all some combination of sarcastic and flirtatious, the problem is that they all seem to exist to be sexual interests for the Doctor. Tasha Lem’s character had a great deal of potential: she’s a powerful woman leading what is apparently the predominant religious and military force in the galaxy, attempting to maintain a peace between some of the most violent and destructive races. But in the narrative she exists primarily as another woman who must flirt with the Doctor.

This type of benevolent sexism has become a pattern in Moffat’s treatment of women; he assures us that the Doctor isn’t bothered by women in positions of power because he finds powerful women sexy and attractive, but by doing so he reduces these women to sexual interests. A woman apparently can’t be in a position of power without also being a sexual interest for the Doctor. In Steven Moffat’s Doctor Who, women, even when they are in positions of power and strength, are primarily there for the enjoyment of men.

The sexualization of Tasha’s power and her attempts to assert her autonomy became extremely problematic during the scene when the Doctor kisses her without her consent. When the Doctor releases Tasha she orders him to only kiss her when asked, and the Doctor replies “Only if you ask nicely,” and they immediately give each other bedroom eyes. The Doctor receives no punishment for kissing her without her consent, and her protest at having been kissed without her consent is trivialized and sexualized. It’s not a big deal she was kissed without her consent, the show tells us, because she secretly liked it.

Even more disturbing is the fact that this is the second time in a year I’ve had to write about Doctor Who’s problematic treatment of sexual assault. Including the scene in “The Crimson Horror” where the Doctor laughs off Jenny’s protest that he forcibly kissed her was bad enough, but including a second scene in which the Doctor is portrayed laughing off a woman’s protest that he forcibly kissed her so soon after receiving a strong backlash to the first is particularly galling, and it’s hard to read it as anything other than a deliberate provocation.

Clara Oswald

One of the sad ironies of this episode is that there was an amusing, fleshed out, emotionally compelling companion to the Doctor which experienced character growth; it just happened to be a disembodied Cyberman head named “Handles.”

Seriously, why was the episode more invested in developing a contrived companion to the Doctor when so little time has been spent developing Clara’s character? Jenna Coleman, get out while you can, because your acting talents are being wasted here.

Clara’s character served no real purpose in “The Time of the Doctor” and existed mostly as a distraction to the main plot. You literally could have removed her from the entire episode without affecting the overall result. Imagine the episode without Clara: the Doctor would’ve discovered the signal from Trenzalore, made his way to the planet without distraction, and discovered the Time Lords with Handles’ help. Forced into a stalemate, he would’ve remained there for hundreds of years fighting off his enemies and defending the Time Lords. The only action Clara takes which affects the outcome is when she begs the deus ex machina Time Lords to help the Doctor and grant him another regeneration. Not only did that moment raise a number of frustrating questions (Why didn’t the Doctor just talk to the Time Lords and coordinate a way to have them appear at another crack in a safer location? Since his grave is no longer on Trenzalore, did all the events of Season 7 just not happen?) it literally could’ve been done by any random character. In fact, it might have been more meaningful coming from a citizen of Christmas itself.

It was also a remarkably passive way to affect the plot. Compare Clara’s actions in “The Time of the Doctor” to Rose’s actions in “The Parting of the Ways.” Both Rose and Clara are sent away by the Doctor “for their own safety.” But Rose absorbs the power of the Time Vortex to bring herself back to the Doctor. She actively wields the power of the Vortex to save the Doctor and the Earth, and her actions directly affect the outcome of the episode. In addition, the Doctor is punished by the narrative for denying Rose her agency. Rose only became the Bad Wolf because she was sent away by the Doctor, and when the Bad Wolf begins to kill her the Doctor sacrifices himself to save her life. His death is a direct result of sending Rose away without her consent.

Clara, meanwhile, is sent home without her consent twice. The first time she manages to come back by clinging to the TARDIS, but the second time she is sent back she sits at home and weeps for the Doctor’s impending death. She only returns to the Doctor when Tasha Lem fetches her for the express purpose of providing emotional comfort to the Doctor as he dies. Her one direct action that affects the plot- begging the Time Lords for help- is just begging for someone else to take action to save the Doctor, rather than taking any action herself. It seems as if the only real purpose for Clara being in “The Time of the Doctor” is so that she can cry for the Doctor.

Furthermore, we have a continuation of the same problems from Series 7: Clara lacks any meaningful characterization beyond “flirty girl who fancies the Doctor.” This Christmas episode was the perfect opportunity to build on Clara’s characterization and show her interacting with people other than the Doctor. Yet she received almost no meaningful interaction with her family. In fact, I’m not entirely certain how some of them were even related to her. It’s as if there are no plans for her character now that she’s no longer the “Impossible Girl,” and without that, she has no real defining characteristics.

Looking to the Future

Quite honestly, if it wasn’t for this blog, I would stop watching Doctor Who entirely until Steven Moffat is gone.

This used to be fun, and it’s not anymore. Doctor Who never has been and never will be a perfect television show, but at least I enjoyed it while I was critiquing it. In fact, half the joy of being a fan of something is critically engaging with it. But the flaws in Doctor Who have become so serious that I can’t even enjoy watching it anymore.

But I will keep watching because I can’t sit idly by while a show with the audience and power of Doctor Who, a show that I used to enjoy so much, continues to treat its women so horribly. The important thing to remember is that this era of Doctor Who is just a blip. It has been a better show and can be better again if we demand it. We have to challenge the show’s problematic elements and hold the creators behind the show accountable for what they do.

I’m frankly relieved that we have to wait eight months for the next episode of Doctor Who. This episode was supposed to get me excited to see Peter Capaldi as the Twelfth (Fourteenth?) Doctor, but all I feel is an impending sense of dread. The fresh slate a new Doctor provides might help fix some of the problems with the show’s narrative, but the problems with the way the show treats its female characters won’t be solved without serious changes behind the scenes. I wish I could say I was looking forward to watching a new era of Doctor Who with Peter Capaldi, but I’m just dreading reviewing another series of episodes like this.