10 Dumbest Doctor Who Controversies
Did a female Doctor Who REALLY turn a generation of boys into criminals?
Doctor Who has attracted its fair share of controversies over the past six decades. Concerns about the levels of violence during both the Tom Baker and Colin Baker eras resulted in steps being taken to soften the show, from swapping out Philip Hinchcliffe with Graham Williams in the late 1970s, to putting the show on hiatus in the mid 1980s.
However, unlike the legitimate concerns about the excesses of The Deadly Assassin or Revelation of the Daleks, there are much smaller, dumber, and paradoxically louder controversies in the modern age.
Much of this is driven by the media's desperate need for stories to fill a never-ending 24-hour news cycle. As a result, newspapers, reactionary talk shows, and outraged YouTubers spin hours of content out of the news that a handful of viewers complained to Ofcom about some imagined scandal that they can spin as 'Doctor Woke.'
Some of those controversies have obvious homophobic, transphobic, and downright racist undercurrents, so this list isn't going to dignify them with inclusion here. But needless to say, the small-scale nature of these controversies provides a window into who the true 'snowflakes' are when it comes to Doctor Who discourse.
10. Peter Capaldi Is Too Old To Play The Doctor
In 2013, it was announced that one of the UK's greatest actors – and major star of the BBC's foul-mouthed comedy hit The Thick of It – would be the next Doctor Who. It was an incredible bit of casting that felt like an extra special 50th anniversary present.
Or at least, it was if you weren't one of the ageist trolls scuttling around in the rocks upturned by the Daily Mail in the wake of Capaldi's casting announcement.
"Too old. Same age as the first Dr in 1908. All the others were more than 10yrs younger", said a user called shirley1919. Bit rich from somebody born in 1919, Shirley!
Meanwhile, another user was disappointed that the Doctor wouldn't be "cute" any more, while another claimed that the Doctor "needed to be someone younger and more attractive to keep Dr Who relevant."
Because it's not like the show became a pop-culture juggernaut under a 55-year-old or anything... oh wait.
It's tempting to ponder if these lunatic responses led to Steven Moffat making such a huge deal about the Twelfth Doctor not being Clara's "boyfriend" any more. Seems likely.