There are also a few more stills from the steam up over on Flickr.

So, could the Doctor be woman? Yes. Of course she could.

It’s unimaginable. The Doctor has always been a man.

All sorts of arguments have been put forward that the Doctor could not be a woman. I’ll admit, a couple were new to me this time round, but only because they were so feeble that it was hard to credit their conception.

Perhaps the first objection to a woman Doctor is that the Doctor has always been a man. It’s obvious, if trivial.

The Doctor had always had white hair. Until he hadn’t. Straight hair. Until he hadn’t. He’d always been old/thin/RP until he wasn’t.

The idea that the Doctor could be a woman was first popularised when Tom Baker suggested it as he departed from the role, a moment in history closer to the show’s origins than to the present day. Hearing the idea for the first time, it might have been that the idea was unimaginable: the instant reaction. Then, after a couple of moments imagining it, it had been imagined. The concept had been introduced. So it wasn’t unimaginable any more.

It’s unimaginable. The Doctor is a man.

This is tied into ideas around gender and identity, the fluidity of which may be difficult for some to accept. Perhaps not so much the Doctor himself, who has had to cope, ten times, with his physical form and his personality transformed; but maybe for the audience (and maybe for his wife River). The concept of changing gender is not new, but perhaps the idea of a sudden, spontaneous change is a bit unusual.

There haven’t been many transgender characters in Doctor Who so far (Cassandra, The Corsair, Susan the horse). But all the same, it’s startling, in 2013, to hear a host on a reasonably popular Doctor Who podcast to proclaim that “the Doctor is a caucasian male”. Really? Actually, never mind catching up with 21st century attitudes – how is it possible to follow the show and identify the Doctor in this way? He’s a TIME LORD from the PLANET GALLIFREY; he is AN ALIEN. From the first couple of episodes back in 1963 the writers challenged the audience  who tried to project their particular identification and value system onto him.

Someone told me this week they thought a female Doctor was ‘implausible’. She hadn’t even thought how completely she now accepted the concept of regeneration (a totally ludicrous notion). A female Doctor? Nonsense.

Boys need a rôle model.

The Daily Mail ran an article (no link on principle) arguing that the Doctor, as a hero who resolved conflict using intellect and ingenuity rather than violence was a powerful rôle model for young boys. So, if we accept that the boys could not have a female Doctor as a hero, what does sticking with a male Doctor say about the importance of the young girls among the audience?

We can’t have a female Doctor, Moffat can’t write women.

No, seriously, I have genuinely seen this point argued. But I will admit this was new to me!

The question of how Moffat treats women in his writing is a very interesting one. There is, I think, a case to answer (while I am a fan of his writing, there are a couple of instances of what appears to be casual misogyny that I’d be interested to explore, hoping to be shown to be wrong).

But if we accepted this, it wouldn’t of course be just an argument against a female Doctor. It would be an argument for having few (if any) major female characters while Moffat remains lead writer.

There’d better be a good narrative reason for having a female Doctor.

Really? The way the Doctor is identified, and identifies himself, has far less to do with his sexuality and gender than any other character in mainstream fiction I can think of.

If I toss a coin 11 times, the chances of getting heads every time is 1/2048.

There’d better be a good narrative reason for having a male Doctor for the 12th time in a row.

A woman Doctor is just part of an ‘agenda’.

This often follows from the last argument: having a woman would only be in order to satisfy some sort of politically correct crusade, to appease a pressure group or meet some kind of imaginary quota.

I believe they should get the best, most suitable actor for the role. If that is a man that’s fine.

But it would be a shame to halve the pool of potential actors, and maybe not cast the best actor for the part, by insisting on one particular gender if there’s no good reason to. That applies to a pre-determination that the rôle should go to a man as much as if it were pre-determined it should go to a woman.

A woman Doctor? No, no, no. You are wrong.

This is the only ‘argument’ that holds water. Because if that’s your preference/prejudice/personal predilection you are entitled to it. But there’s no debate to be had, no rationalisation.

That’s why the Today programme ‘debate’ had, for example. two people agreeing the Doctor could be a woman (to Sarah Montague’s apparent dismay). After all it wasn’t until @DrMatthewSweet revealed that Time Lords reproduce on looms that John Humphrys threatened to take the programme off air half an hour early.

That’s why it seems me that there’s nothing left to discuss. Unless I’ve missed something?

I’ve tried to avoid any of the names that are already doing the rounds (not that I’ve any objection to Ben Wishaw, Idris Elba, Ben Daniels et. al.) because there are plenty of discussions about them already. Probably everyone on my list has already been suggested, but I haven’t seen them mentioned, at least since Matt Smith’s announcement.

1. Nicola Walker is my top choice. Saw her in Edmund with Brannagh, also thought she was very good in early Spooks. Intense, quirky and very very alien. I can’t understand why she isn’t the bookies’ favourite.
   
2. Julian Rhind-Tutt would be great. There were loads of superb performances in The Hour which was when I first thought Wishaw would make a good Doctor. But while Wishaw is perhaps a little too much of a gawky alien in the Matt Smith vein to follow straight on, Rhind-Tutt demonstrated is versatility as the sleazy Angus McCain. Great comic timing, but a very forceful presence when required.
3. Rob Brydon must be on the bookies’ lists somewhere, but I haven’t spotted him. Maybe a little to Earthly to convey convincingly the Gallifreyan heritage, but what a ride in the TARDIS that would be…
4. Andrew Gower is only 23 so he’s far too young for the rôle. But if they insist on casting youngsters (and I will admit Matt Smith turned out well) he’d not be a bad choice. As the solicitor Cutler in the fourth series of Being Human he walked off with every scene he was in…
5. Louise Brealey has actually played an almost-companion to Tom Baker in Foe From The Future. But while Sheridan Smith, who is also being touted as a possible Doctor, is now firmly embedded in my mind as a companion following her four series with the Eighth Doctor as Lucie Miller, Brealey could be as good as the titutular Time Lord as she would be resuming her role as “Charlotte-from-the-village”. Another intense actor, with quirky timing, and quite capable of playing weird and surprising you.

But while Tennant was the actor I had wanted in the rôle in 2005 when the show came back, I had no idea who could match him in the rôle when he left. Then Matt Smith came along, an actor I’d never heard of, and did so. Now I can’t imagine who could equal Smith, but I hope there’s an actor I’m about to hear of who is going to do just that…

Was it necessary to “make the cybermen scary again”? Did they stop being scary, or just get dealt a few duff stories? The problem with a cyberman that can move at something close to light speed is it’s not just scary – it is to all intents and purposes invincible. (And how come Angie didn’t suffer whiplash being carried away so fast no one could see her go?) The only way you can tell a story in which such a monster is defeated is to escalate the heroes’ power/weaponry to equally magical heights (a big magic gun that fires red lasers, for example) or just forget the cybermen can move fast and have them go back to lumbering again when they enter your castle. Equally, instand upgrades that can overcome any obstacle are a bit silly. (And surely you install upgrades as soon as they are available, rather than waiting for vulnerabilities that need patching to appear?)

This is a story that’s full of interesting ideas – the cyber wars (although this has been done in the spin-offs, for example the Orion wars, with more success), autonomous detachable body parts (but surely that’s limited to non-organic parts – so not a head?) or the cyber-mites (albeit somewhat too large to convincingly be capable of entering the human body so easily). But throwing ideas at a page doesn’t create a compellingly structured story… Each of these ideas needs space to be developed; cyber-mites on their own were a good enough threat to carry an episode on their own. Nor did the production help; we’re so used to Doctor Who looking fabulous now that the obvious studio set theme park jarred terribly; the platoon appeared to be clad in plastic toy armour and there appeared to have been no attempt to make the CGI ruis match the location foregrounds. Warwick Davis did, it is true, give a fabulous performance, but the reveal seemed an unnecessary twist and rather cheapened his character.

The Doctor tussling inside his own mind is not a new idea (The Three Doctors) but while it’s been made to work in audio plays, I don’t think it’s successful on screen and this instance didn’t change my mind. Somehow, despite being a different setup, it reminded me a bit of Meglos and if you haven’t seen that, no, the Doctor’s conflict with a potted plant was not his finest moment… Okay, Nightmare in Silver wasn’t quite as bad as Closing Time but it edges out Angels Take Manhatten as my least favourite story in this current, otherwise generally good, series.

So – next week The Name of the Doctor. I’ve avoided the spoilers resulting from the BBC’s accidental DVD dispatch, so this is speculation… But obviously there is absolutely no chance that we, the viewers, will hear his name uttered (it’s Endeavour, by the way) or find out the answer to the question Doctor Who? But I’m betting there will finally be an explicit reference to Omega in there… And will it turn out to be coincidence that one constant throughout this series, despite the change in companion, that the Doctor has dropped Clara/The Ponds back home after each discrete adventure… or will there be some narrative significance to this structure?

Since coming back as 45 minute episodes, Doctor Who has had issues with pacing. Introducing a whole new environment, new characters, telling a story and wrapping it all up is a tall order for the time available. The pacing has ended up uneven. This mini-season has taken quite a successful approach: minimising the story to allow some atmosphere to develop and give it room to breath. But even then the stories have been too thin; each one has had some obvious padding just to sustain it to the full 45. Somehow, in The Crimson Horror, Mark Gatiss has condensed a satisfying saga with a goodly group of protagonists and made 45 minutes feel feature length.

For the first 15 minutes I was convinced we were getting a Doctor-lite episode (see also Love & Monsters, Blink, Turn Left, The Girl Who Waited). That’s fine with me, I always enjoy those. It also appeared to be a stealth pilot for a full series of The Veiled Detective. Also good. On the strength of that 15 minutes, I’d happily watch the full series.

Diana Rigg was excellent (yes, perhaps a little OTT, but forgivable in the circumstances). She may have developed disappointingly reactionary views but she’s still got it in the acting dept. And I adored Catrin Stewart’s tribute to Mrs Peel’s leather-clad action heroics. Even better was her real life and onscreen daughter Rachael Stirling. The episode was properly scary, too – the processing (and failed processing) was quite horrific.

Continuity corner: we get a major (and rather surprising) Tegan reference. It seems remarkable that in 2007 calling the crab monsters The Macra seemed daring for its unusual admission of 20th century Who continuity, and now we’re getting throwaway references the gobby Australian. But I’m still utterly delighted that we can have scenes in this one carried by a members of the Silurian and Sontaran races (introduced 1970 & 1973).

So I could list the niggles: the sepia-film flashback style laid it on a bit thick (though the condensed setup was effective), the optograms (the effort made to make these seem credible made them less so), surviving the rocket launch trapped in the shaft, etc. etc. It doesn’t really matter. (I don’t think I even picked up what the actual purpose of the processing was…) This story was fabulous.

I even enjoyed Angie and Artie’s Clive Banks moment. But I hope that Clara makes the obvious assumption about a picture of her in Victorian London: that she will go there in her (personal) future…

A TARDIS bound story in the run up to the 50th anniversary was also inevitably going to be laden with continuity references, and indeed it was – with voice clips, a book of the History of the Time War, and The Eye of Harmony.

After a run of episodes where each managed to better the last, I knew some clunker would have to come along and lower the bar again. So I was watching, resigned to this fact, with a hint of satisfaction at being proved right and it wasn’t until about 35 minutes in that I found I was enjoying myself. Apart from the Doctor being half human, there is nothing as trivial which enrages fans more than the broken continuity of The Eye of Harmony, so I was amused by the audaciousness of contradicting both irreconcilable strands of continuity here. But it was the precipice scene (the TARDIS’s snarl) that really won me over – especially the line “I think I’m more scared of you than anything else on that Tardis right now.” Smith and Coleman are better than ever in this story – and the dynamic between them is extraordinary in this. The Doctor obviously sees Clara as more of a puzzle than a person (“the salvage of a lifetime”) while Clara’s fear and suspicion comes to the fore (“good guys don’t keep zombies”).

Some things to look out for:

• As in last week’s episode, we are told Clara is ‘just Clara’. This is being hammered in, so it’s bound to be the case that she’s something more.
• Clara recognises the Doctor’s name (“so that’s who…”). So, unless she has a really well-kept secret, the Doctor’s name means something to humans. We already know it. Hmmm…
• The Doctor’s cot reappears in this one. Will we get a resolution to the question of why he has it in his TARDIS?

Other good points: the lighting, while it wasn’t exactly subtle, was very effective; love the TARDIS library; also the Doctor’s waistcoat.

I had to re-watch this one because I didn’t get what was going on first time round. A second viewing not only resolved my queries, it was even more enjoyable to watch. It’s true that no “reset button” plot-line is ever really forgivable, and the salvage crew were just as one-dimensional second time round (the gag about pretending Tricky was an android would have been funny if any of them had any personality), but if you aren’t over sensitive to continuity niggles, from the moment Clara and the Doctor are reunited and begin their journey to the centre of the TARDIS, there’s one great scene after another.

And from the trailer, next weeks Cadbury’s episode looks good too!

You can hear me put forward these points that contradict Ben & Eugene’s view that this episode is no good, in Fusion Patrol, at 50’35″:

Photo John_Rylands-B5905 by image_less_ordinary CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Generic

The mirrorless/CSC cameras do away with the prism that allows you to have an optical viewfinder, and bring the lens close to the sensor in a smaller, lighter body. Some have the same size sensor as entry-level DSLRs (APS-C) while others have smaller sensors allowing for even smaller bodies and lenses (but potentially at the cost of image quality). Some have an electronic viewfinder (EVF) which essentially mimic an optical viewfinder by offering a tiny TV screen you can shove your eye up against; others just have a screen.

I wanted a few things from a new camera, addressing some drawbacks I’d found with the D40:

• A big, bright screen.
• Touch focus (press the screen, like on the iPhone) and the option of a ‘manual’ focus ring on the lens (this still isn’t mechanical, however, it’s just another interface for driving the focus motor).
• The ability to shoot movies (so I double the benefit I get from new lenses) preferably with autofocus.

I narrowed it down to a couple of cameras: the Sony NEX5 and the Panasonic Lumix GF3. The GF3 was far cheaper, and had (I felt) a better choice of lenses. Sony are the only company that make cameras using E-mount lenses. Panasonic and Olympus have collaborated and the m43 standards so their lenses are inter-changeable (although image stabilisation is handled differently by the two manufacturers, making Olympus telephoto lenses less suitable for Panasonic bodies). Also there were reports of the Sony NEX5 overheating when shooting movies for an extended period of time. So the GF3 it was.

The Panasonic ‘GF’ series are their low end models, primarily aimed at those moving ‘up’ from compact cameras, and from the GF1 more and more was removed to the point where an intermediate model (the GX1) was introduced to cater for the enthusiasts. All the same, I went for the GF3 (it has no hot shoe, so no external flash, and no option for an EVF) because it is so a small and light. At 274g with battery (no lens) it’s half the weight of the D40 body. It’s my first step in testing the m43 waters, as well as an experiment in seeing if I’ll use a lighter camera more often (if I buy the 14mm prime, the total camera weight will be just 330g). And if I like m43 I can buy a fancier, heavier body with which it can share lenses, if I choose to later on.

Early impressions:

• It’s really small. That’s great, in a way, but it’s tricky for my big hands to grip, so it’s less comfortable to use. It’ll take some getting used to.
• I don’t miss the viewfinder. (Picking up the D40 just now, it took me a while to remember I couldn’t just look at the back, I had to bend and put my eye to it.)
• The menus are very well designed. Using aperture it’s much easier to set or monitor which f-stop you’re using.
• Shooting a movie is a doddle with the dedicated button. Much easier than the iPhone.
• It’s very, very fast to start up, and to focus too.
• It may seem obvious, but micro four-thirds has a different aspect ratio (4:3). I knew this, but I didn’t think about whether I liked it. It turns out I don’t.
• The D40 is much more comfortable to use. I know I’ve said that, but it’s worth mentioning twice.

Here are the photos I’ve taken so far (24 at the time of writing, but that number will grow).

There has been no instantaneous revelation  I do find I miss the D40, although when I pick it up there are already new imperfections the GF3 has brought to light. I need to spend more time with the GF3 getting used to it, so I need to set the D40 aside for a few months and see if I grow accustomed to the Panasonic.

Turns out I’m not the first to do this. Over a year ago, Ade Rixon did much the same thing, buying a Lumix GF1 rather than going straight to upgrade his D50. His report, 6 months later, provides a possible glimpse of my future. Maybe.

It used to be worse. My first camera was neat little 110 than weighted next to nothing, and slipped neatly into a pocket. Focus and aperture were fixed, film and disposable flashes were expensive, but I savoured the moments when I felt I could justify the expense of depressing the shutter release. I liked that camera so much, that when I had some pocket money of my own, I bought loads more. I scoured the sunday morning car boot sale. I bought indiscriminately: if the shutter worked, I was content. 35mm with manual focus rings, aperture controls, even one with a built in exposure meter. The lenses were soft, some even had light leaks. I didn’t care. I even bought a Brownie for which I had no hope of getting any film. I made my Dad bring his old enlarger down from the loft and converted the bathroom into a dark room. The enlarger had mould on the lens. The prints were fuzzy and indistinct.

At sixth-form college I learned to focus on the photography. In properly equipped dark rooms, I learned about using the equipment to get the best contrast levels, and correct exposure. I was exposed to some great photographs myself. I still bought cameras: but this time with a little more discernment and a lot more purpose. I bought Canan SLRs with FD lenses (an AE1 and a T70 and various lenses I could swap between them – while one was loaded with colour film and the other with black and white). I loved the control I was getting with these decent, affordable, manual lenses.

A decade later, the revelation of autofocus was the result of a gift from a friend of an old Nikon F401. Speed and quality from the same camera. I started again with a new system… But this was the dawn of digital and the SLR kept getting left alone in favour of a 3MP compact (the Minolta Dimage X, since you ask) because it gave me unlimited shooting, instand feedback, and the many other benefits of bypassing film processing altogether. So, making a pact with a similarly enthusiastic (but considerably more talented) friend, we both bought Nikon D40s and went digital. And it’s been by far the best camera I’ve owned. That was over five years ago, I’ve taken loads and loads of pictures with it, and I even think my photography may have improved…

I think the D40 cured me of my camera habit. I’ve had all that fun without buying any new equipment; the kit lens has been such a pleasure I’ve not rushed to buy additional lenses. (I have bought one lens: a second 18-55mm lens to replace the original after I bashed it on a rock shooting a sunset on Marloes Sands…) So now, I’m just about ready, and I think I’m justified, in buying myself a decent Nikkor telephoto zoom for it…

But. But.

A couple of things: Just as the digital compact lured me away from the f401, so I noted last year the inferior iPhone camera has been luring me away from D40 with its lovely large screen and touch focusing. And my friend +David Harrison pointed me to this article, in which Trey Ratcliffe boldly declares he will no longer buy new DSLR kit and pronounces that the future is mirrorless, and the 3rd generation has dawned. So, I wondered, should I buy a lens for a DLSR, if DSLRs are dying…? So, I made a decision.

To be continued…

There are two things I particularly like Doctor Who doing. One is the genre episodes, like The Unquiet Dead (period Dickensian) or the Unicorn and the Wasp (Poirot style whodunnit) or A Town Called Mercy (western). This was going to be a haunted house story so I was looking forward to that, but it didn’t turn out to be quite what I expected. The other thing I like is when Doctor Who surprises me and it doesn’t happen that often. Well, tonight, it really did surprise. What starts as a Stone Tapes style paranormal investigation opens out in scope into a survey of Earth’s entire history in a way that makes Tom Baker’s brief jaunt in The Pyramids of Mars seem like a trip down the road to the chemist, and reminded me of the primordial sequences in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, Douglas Adam’s reworking of one of his unmade Doctor Who serials, Shada. Clara is startled by the casualness with which the Doctor treats this history of her planet. This is tied nicely to a well drawn scene in which our sympathies lie with Clara who is engaging the confidence of Grayling. When suddenly, the empathetic Grayling warns Clara against the Doctor, it challenges our loyalty to him as viewers. We have bonded with these two girls, and moreover, we know what Grayling says to be true.

The whole episode is told with terrific economy. The cast is small, the locations limited, the special effects appear on screen only briefly (although that could well belie the effort involved in creating several different planet-scapes) and they really count. But what initially appears to be a very spare storyline is layered with an inter-dimensional, trans-temporal story being layered onto the ghost story (with a love story as the cherry on the cake). Once you unpack it, there’s an awful lot going on and underneath it we learn a little more about Clara’s relationship with the TARDIS (and with the Doctor), and the Doctor’s pursuit of the mystery of Clara. It is extremely efficient storytelling, both in terms of crafting a satisfying episode in its own right, and situating it within (and having it drive forward) the season-story arc. There are nods to the past (Planet of the Spiders, Turn Left) yet in a story that is like nothing Doctor Who has done before. This one is a bit special.

You can listen to me say all this with your ears, at 45’35″, on Fusion Patrol:

Image Misty Forest by Dru! CC-BY-NC 2.0 Generic

This was a cracking script from Gatiss, cementing his recent return to form. It was so good, I almost wondered if he’d had it sitting in a drawer from when Doctor Who returned to television eight years ago (or even earlier) waiting for the right opportunities to get it made. And that connects with one of my two small criticisms: that Clara was written as a rather generic companion in this one, and I could easily imagine Rose and the Ninth Doctor or Martha and the Tenth Doctor being inserted into the lead roles with virtually no rewrites at all. I suppose in creating a companion whose primary quality is mysteriousness, Moffat has given his mid-season writers a pretty tough time.

The other reservation I had concerned  the middle section, with the horror sequences of the naked ice warrior hiding behind the pipework on the submarine. I could almost imagine that two alternative stories had been vying in Gatiss’ imagination to occupy this submarine setting: the creepy X-Files style monster of the week horror, and a return for the iconic Doctor Who noble soldier race. Rather than choosing one or the other, they’ve been melded together, which almost works, but not quite. I think that’s because it’s always been suggested the code of the ice warriors would require them to choose death before dishonour, but this (in)famous soldier’s attitude appeared to be almost everything else before dishonour, then death, in that order.

The choices made about what would be shown or not shown on screen were interesting. Initially I’d assume the armourless ice-warrior would stay out of frame (we’ve never seen an armourless ice-warrior before and it was fine with me that that state of affairs should continue). But gradually were were shown more and more. When we we shown nothing, the effect was superbly sinister. When we were shown his hands, I couldn’t help feeling that it looked like he might share some DNA with an Earth chicken. His head shown in shadow worked quite well  - when we only saw the reds of his eyes – but on the better lighting of the bridge his head had a cartoonish and unimpressive appearance. Meanwhile the dismembered bodies that were supposed to have so profound an effect on Clara were not visible to us at all. We didn’t even get the merest sign of blood-spatter – which made it hard to recognise what she was reacting too…

Overall, however, it was a terrific story. A classic monster is given treatment that will guarantee a new generation of fans will be scared witless. Once again, great performances from Smith and Coleman and a superb guest cast – not least David Warner – and Nick Briggs gives easily his best ice warrior yet (he regularly voices them on the Big Finish audios). With a satisfying ending, and a trailer for a cracking looking episode next week, I’m still very enjoying this mini-season a great deal.

Hear me say all this again in the Fusion Patrol review of Cold War at 51’29″ and get 51’29″ of Ben and Eugene talking about it too!

Image: Forward Torpedo Room by cliff1066™ CC-BY 2.0 Generic