Helen Mirren has thrown her hat in the ring to become the twelfth Time Lord in the Doctor Who series, and I would really love to see this happen. I started watching Doctor Who this year, and its Buffyesque “Big Bad of the Week” formula sucked me in almost immediately. So far I’ve only seen the 10th and 11th Doctors’ seasons, and both David Tennant and Matt Smith were fantastic. But who’s to say that when the Time Lord regenerates into a new body, it has to be another white man’s body?
As much as I enjoy Doctor Who (again: I haven’t watched the older series so I fully admit my n00bness), I can’t pretend that the “companion” thing doesn’t bug me a little bit. For those who don’t watch the show, companions are the young and often extremely attractive young women the Doctor recruits as his platonic traveling partners. Three of the companions I’ve seen onscreen (Rose, Martha, and Amy) had the hots for him. The Doctor is a somewhat asexual 900-something-year-old who travels the universe in Chuck Taylors and a bow tie, seemingly content to have almost no emotional obligation to anyone. Over the course of their adventures with him, the companions develop their inner hero while the Doctor continually ignores or rebuffs their signs of romantic interest. This is an extremely reductive description, and one that was arguably turned on its head a bit in season 6 with the River Song storyline, but the Doctor/companion power dynamic is completely fascinating to me. It was a happy day when I discovered Doctor Who Sexual Review, a Tumblr that obsessively catalogs every facet of this subject.
Rumors of possibly casting a black actor as the 11th doctor sparked controversy a few years ago; even the fact that they ended up casting such a young [white, male] actor was considered subversive. So I’m not sure if, or when, we’ll ever see a female Doctor with a hot young companion of her own ─ what’s Hugh Dancy up to these days? ─ but Helen Mirren would be the perfect woman for the job.
