Overreaction to the New Doctor

So, we're going to play this game now.

I check out a lot of film/TV/geek sites every day on my Google Reader, and I was a bit surprised by the overreaction of a number of those sites to the casting of Matt Smith as the Eleventh Doctor. Granted, I'm simply not enthused by the choice. But that's simply because I don't know Matt Smith's work and I feel a bit annoyed that they cast someone so young. (And the youth thing is simply part of a larger annoyance I have with most of pop culture, where everyone seems to be a child these days--this was my same reaction to casting people too young to have a child as parents Superman and Lois Lane in Superman Returns; Superman is thirty, it's okay if he's an adult.) Still, as I said in the linked post, I trust Stephen Moffat's judgment and his creative abilities, so I'll wait and see what Smith does with the role. I have misgivings, sure, but I'll be happy to have them dispelled. Wait and see and hope for the best.

A number of the sites I read have said more or less the same thing. What surprised me was the way some sites have gone wild over the actor chosen as "another white male." Apparently, because so much of the fan rumor over the new Doctor involved Paterson Joseph or Chiwetel Ejiofor, it's somehow, according to a lot of writers today, an either unconscious or conscious bit of racism on the part of the BBC to cast "yet another" white guy as the Doctor. Apparently this has something to do with Barack Obama being elected president; now that we've got our first black president, we're supposed to have a black Doctor, or else we're all somehow racists. I'm not sure how or why it works that way, but all of a sudden Doctor Who, one of the more innovative and progressive-thinking science fiction series on television, is being painted as behind the times and medieval in its thinking simply because the Doctor isn't black.

Or a woman! That's been sparking even more heated commentary in chatrooms today. I simply can't read it because it's too annoying. Would it be interesting to see a woman play the Doctor? Yes, of course it would. Catherine Tate gave us a taste of that on the finale to series four, and it was pretty wonderful. I'd love to see an actress like Rachel Weisz or Gina Bellman or Emma Thompson play the Doctor. What I don't understand is the men who are extremely, utterly resistant to this idea, who get in chatrooms and write long, unreadable explanations as to why the Doctor can never, ever be a woman. I mean, the Doctor can be anyone, right? That's the beauty of the Doctor. The writers figured out a long time ago how to avoid precisely what makes DC Comics so dull and Marvel Comics so desperate: the Doctor can go on and on forever because the Doctor can literally be anyone. It doesn't have to be the same person over and over and they don't have to pull more and more desperate gimmicks out of their hats to make him appear to be the same person over and over.

Anyway, Matt Smith may not be my choice, but I'm not a producer on Doctor Who, am I? I've always wanted it to be Patrick Stewart, myself, but we all have our choices. Robson Green, or Jack Davenport, or James Nesbitt, or Bill Nighy, or Colin Salmon. Paterson Joseph would have been an interesting choice; he's an interesting actor. And maybe Matt Smith is a little underwhelming because we've been teased for a while with Paterson Joseph and the possibility of David Morrissey (who would've been a marvelous choice). But, as John pointed out in the comments of my previous Doctor Who post, "It's the burden of a Who fan to watch and wait and accept [. . .] Everyone has their favorite and their least favorite, but it's never destroyed the show."

So my question for the dissenters who have gotten into a snit over the race of the actor playing the Doctor who have asked "Why does the Doctor have to be a white guy?" is: "Why does the Doctor have to not be a white guy?"