In the latest “Dr. Who” adventure on the BBC (if you don’t know about this long-running cult scifi show, google it), Sir Isaac Newton is played by an actor of Indian heritage:
This raises several issues, most of which Ethics Alarms has delved into before:
1. Does it matter? As Curmie declared in his Comment of the Day regarding my post about another BBC production in which Anne Boleyn was played by a black actress…yes, it does, but it depends on the context and the objective of the casting. The major consideration in any non-traditional casting is whether it works, meaning that the casting isn’t distracting, that it adds something to the work beyond being just a gimmick. (The black Anne Boleyn was a gimmick.) In Curmie’s opinion, almost nobody was likely to see the black actress in the role and think, ““I didn’t know Anne Boleyn was black.” I am less certain of that assumption in the case of a brown Isaac Newton.
2. It matters less in a comedy like “Dr. Who,” if it matters at all. In “The Death of Stalin,” Steve Buscemi played Nikita Khrushchev, whom he resembles as about as much as he resembles Ava Gardner, but it didn’t hurt the movie or the comic impact of his performance. Casting Bill Murray as FDR in a drama was infinitely more harmful than the weird Isaac Newton portrayal.
3. However, the standards applied to race-, gender- or ethnicity- switching in casting has to be applied equally and fairly across all groups, and it isn’t. Casting a white actor to play a real life “Person of Color” is called “whitewashing” and is taboo. The hypocrisy now extends to arguing that only disabled actors should play disabled people, and only a morbidly obese actor should be allowed to play an obese character, without resorting to prosthetics Brendan Fraser did in “The Whale.” Philippine actor Lou Diamond Phillips complained that he or other actors of his heritage should be cast in roles portraying Philippine characters, though Phillips has made a career out of playing Hispanics and Native Americans. Tom Hanks (absurdly—and he’s smarter than this) said that a gay actor should have been cast in his Academy Award-winning role as the lawyer dying of AIDS in “Philadelphia.” (Why not a gay actor who was really dying of AIDS, Tom? And shouldn’t he have had a law degree too?)
The current politically correct casting ethics are designed to result in discrimination against whites, males, and any other category that Woke World regards as “oppressors.” It is ultimately DEI applied to art.
4. And here’s the smoking gun: Steven Moffat, the now-retired executive producer of “Dr. Who,” told BBC journalists in 2016 that he was devoted to the concept of “positive discrimination.” “Young people watching have to know that they have a place in the future. That really matters. You have to care profoundly what children’s shows in particular say about where you’re going to be…Outside of the fiction, it’s about anyone feeling that they can be involved in this industry as an actor, a director, a writer… We’ve kind of got to tell a lie. We’ll go back into history and there will be black people where, historically, there wouldn’t have been, and we won’t dwell on that. We’ll say, ‘To hell with it, this is the imaginary, better version of the world. By believing in it, we’ll summon it forth’.”
This is another demonstration of why artists and those involved in entertainment can’t be trusted to have a significant role in social engineering, and why their influence, as well as their eagerness to wield that influence, is as often destructive as not. Moffat was wholeheartedly endorsing the totalitarian device of airbrushing history for the purpose of indoctrination, while suggesting that the world would be a better place today if Isaac Newton had been born in Calcutta.
Of such facile reasoning great disasters are born.
This is the route that Disney has taken, and it has crippled the company from playing the unifying and beneficent role it once did in U.S. culture. Thus did “South Park” neatly skewer Disney producer Kathleen Kennedy’s wokey approach to recycling Disney classics:
At least “Dr. Who” let its Sir Isaac keep his gonads.
Ethics Alarms 
”Steven Moffat, the now-retired executive producer of “Dr. Who,” told BBC journalists in 2016 that he was devoted to the concept of “positive discrimination.” “Young people watching have to know that they have a place in the future. That really matters. You have to care profoundly what children’s shows in particular say about where you’re going to be…Outside of the fiction, it’s about anyone feeling that they can be involved in this industry as an actor, a director, a writer… We’ve kind of got to tell a lie. We’ll go back into history and there will be black people where, historically, there wouldn’t have been, and we won’t dwell on that. We’ll say, ‘To hell with it, this is the imaginary, better version of the world. By believing in it, we’ll summon it forth’.”
In which the progressive reveals his own racism through the soft bigotry of low expectations-
“I see the world through the prism of race. I expect all these young children to first see themselves as whatever ancestral tribe they are and to also posses the same ethnic neuroses I possess and therefore when they see a success white person like Isaac newton they will immediately believe they are inferior to white people. So because of my own neuroses I’m hope to perpetuate, I’d better make sure that the success white person is actually a successful minority.”
Bingo, Michael. And that cancer has been metastasizing since 2016.
Thank you.
My goodness- I typed this all on iPhone and I really don’t think I’m that typo-centric. But it really seems like all the active participles “-ing” and a lot of the adjective endings of words were autocorrected out.
Maybe I really am that ignorant.
Ha ha, Michael, I just assumed you were a nonnative English speaker with the user name Michael West. Maybe an Australian? /s
Also, I have to say it’s telling that I’ve been through half a dozen links and have yet to find a video that actually has sound showing the actors performance. Does he have a significant Indian accent? And, if so, or if not, why is it so hard to find video of the scene with audio?
I haven’t seen one with sound either. I’m assuming that the actor speaks in a typical British accent. If he spoke like Apu, it would be ridiculous. Well, even more ridiculous.
Since blacks have no historical accomplishments of their own, they feel a need to hijack the accomplishments of White people so they can feel better about themselves. In fact, the black people that had actual accomplishment only did so after being exposed to White culture. This may seem racist but I would ask what accomplishment has ever come out of sub Saharan Africa?
BTW, I watched a modern series titled “The Winter King”, another retelling of the King Arthur legend. There were so many blacks in the production one would have thought 5th century England was located in Africa. Even Merlin was black.
As I’m sure I’ve noted here before, we have a name for the property where the composition of any possible sample or subdivision of a thing is exactly the same as the composition of the whole. That property is not called “diversity”, but rather “homogeneity”. And this is what people like Mr. Moffat seek to inject into storytelling – a stifling homogeneity that makes the workhouses of Oliver Swift, or the ballrooms of Pride and Prejudice, look exactly like a sidewalk in today’s London. At first it’s jarring, but then it just becomes bland. Every place and every time is like every other time and place, because the people there are constrained to be different from one another in strictly specified ways.
Moffat’s argument is basically the same argument Oliver Stone gave about his movie JFK. He argued that we needed to teach history as it should have happened. Lots of schools showed JFK and taught it as history.
Of course, Dr. Who started off as an educational show about history and science. Now it is pure propaganda pushing the latest ideology.
“Doctor Who” has been straddling the wokeness for a few years. They made sure to check Female Doctor off the list; it’s already been announced that the new Doctor will be a Black Male. The 12th Doctor’s second companion was a lesbian. With these recent specials, it appears to be embracing the agenda fully.
Fans have been excitedly waiting for the return of David Tennant and Catherine Tate in these latest installments, but – while the entries have been entertaining – I’m finding the checklist casting and representation obnoxious.
In the first installment (aired Thanksgiving weekend), we learned that Tate’s character, Donna Noble, is in an interracial marriage and has a child named Rose. Rose is a trans-girl.
Since the Doctor has now been a woman, having been a male since the character’s inception, there was a little bit of dialogue about how non-binary the Doctor is – because the character can regenerate into male or female forms.
This last episode, the one with the Indian Newton, follows up the good scientist’s scene with Donna commenting on how hot Sir Isaac was. The male Doctor agrees. Then stops, looks odd and quips, “Is that who I am now?” – implying, of course, that he finds Newton attractive which means this version is also now gay when he wasn’t the last time Tennant played him.
“Doctor Who” has generally tried to remain family friendly over the years. Some of that is just because of cheesy effects. However, when they wanted to go mature, they did a spin-off called “Torchwood” to keep the Doctor himself fit for kids (Never mind that kids will want to see shows connected to the same universe and adults these days, God love ’em, ignore age warnings and let them watch anyway).
Is it wrong for the Doctor to be a woman? No. Is it wrong for the Doctor to be black? Of course, not. But we’re getting hit with gender and sexual identity messages pretty hard right now. I wonder if it will turn other fans off, too.
I find this one more interesting than most. As you say, Jack, the nature of the show matters. It’s a fantasy show with comic elements. (Cf. making H.G. Welles a woman in the SyFy series Warehouse 13.) There’s no attempt to re-write history here, as there was in the Anne Boleyn business. I suspect that very few viewers will be taken out of the story by this casting decision.
So, is the stated rationale for making this decision legitimate? Well, sort of. I’m certainly not opposed to providing opportunities for non-white actors, or giving kids a role model who looks like them. Moreover, if the race of a character really doesn’t matter, then it’s “no harm, no foul.” Does it here? Not a lot, but a little.
I’ve made casting decisions that are certainly more drastic. I remember casting a student of Pakistani heritage in a small role in John Millington Synge’s (very Irish) The Well of the Saints. I remember being criticized because the only non-white actor in the cast portrayed a peasant. That’s true, but it’s also true that with the exception of a faux “saint” and the show’s antagonist, literally everyone in a cast of a dozen or more is a peasant.
I’ve cast against race or gender not infrequently, but only for one reason: I believe that this actor can play this role better than anyone else who auditioned and wasn’t already cast elsewhere. Sometimes that meant I needed to cast a big guy, or a beautiful woman, or an actor of a particular race, or whatever; sometimes those concerns matter little if at all.
The BBC, of course, pretty much has its pick of hundreds of thoroughly competent actors who fit the demographic of the character. So whereas I sometimes made choices out of necessity, they do so because it fits their agenda.
Sure, it’s virtue-signaling. It makes me raise an eyebrow, but not to run screaming into the night. If I might violate precept #22, let me just say that “there are worse things.”
I will agree that it is OK to change the race in casting as long as that is the rule. If the rule is “It is OK to change the race, sex, and sexual orientation of white heterosexual male characters only”, then no, I don’t think that is OK. That is actually racist and sexist. Would a production cast Pete Buttigeig in committed heterosexual marriage with children? Would George Washington Carver or Barack Obama be cast as a White or Asian woman?
I never followed Dr. Who that much, and most of that was the Tom Baker iteration. The “reincarnation” factor is a clever way to extend a long-running series with minimal audience-jarring resets. No real reason they couldn’t later include other changes in gender, race, etc. to mix things up a bit and generate fresh plot lines.
As far as I know, though, DW was never presented as “alternate universe”. That is, besides the necessary fictions of the Dr. and events surrounding him, it was “real world” as we know it. Presenting Newton as another race and other such unnecessary wokey changes are pure pandering. (If they had to do it, couldn’t they at least have gotten Ben Kingsley? 😉