Thirteenth Doctor
The Thirteenth Doctor is an incarnation of the Doctor, the protagonist of the BBC's science fiction television series Doctor Who. She is played by Jodie Whittaker, the first woman to portray the character, in three series, five specials and a cameo in the fifteenth series. As with previous incarnations of the Doctor, the character has also appeared in other Doctor Who spin-offs, both during and after the character's televised appearances.
Within the series's narrative, the Doctor is a millennia-old, alien Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey, with somewhat unknown origins, who travels in time and space in their TARDIS, frequently with companions. At the end of life, the Doctor regenerates; as a result, the physical appearance and personality of the Doctor change. Whittaker's incarnation is a light-hearted adventurer with a passion for building things, placing a high value on friendships and striving for non-violent solutions. Preceded in regeneration by the Twelfth Doctor, she is followed by the Fourteenth Doctor.
This incarnation's first companions were the trio of dyspraxic part-time warehouse worker Ryan Sinclair, his step-grandfather and retired bus driver Graham O'Brien, and probationary police officer Yasmin "Yaz" Khan, all of whom she met shortly after her regeneration; after splitting up with the first two, she travels with Yaz and food bank volunteer Dan Lewis. She also had one-episode reunions with former companions Captain Jack Harkness, Tegan Jovanka, and Ace.
Casting
In January 2016, Steven Moffat announced that he would leave the show after the tenth series; he was set to be replaced by new showrunner, Chris Chibnall. Peter Capaldi confirmed a year later that the tenth series would be his last as well. Following this news, several media reports and bookmakers had speculated as to who would replace Capaldi as the Thirteenth Doctor. Bookmakers' favourites included Ben Whishaw, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Kris Marshall, and Tilda Swinton.Casting a woman
The concept of a female Doctor was first mentioned in 1981, when Tom Baker suggested his successor might be female, after announcing the end of his tenure as the Fourth Doctor. Producer, John Nathan-Turner, later discussed the possibility of casting a woman as the Sixth Doctor to replace the departing Peter Davison's Fifth Doctor, claiming it was feasible, but not something he was considering at the moment. In October 1986, during the transmission of Colin Baker's final season as the Sixth Doctor, series creator, Sydney Newman, wrote to BBC Controller, Michael Grade, with a suggestion that "at a later stage, Doctor Who should be metamorphosed into a woman". Dawn French, Joanna Lumley, and Frances de la Tour, were suggested by Newman in 1986 for the role, but were dismissed by the BBC. Lumley later appeared as a satirical version of the Thirteenth Doctor in the 1999 Comic Relief special, The Curse of Fatal Death. Arabella Weir also played an alternative Third Doctor in the Doctor Who Unbound Big Finish episode, Exile. Neither portrayal is typically considered to be within the show's main continuity. Producer, Jane Tranter, also considered casting Judi Dench as the Ninth Doctor.The concept of Time Lords changing sex upon regeneration was seeded throughout Moffat's tenure as showrunner. Just after regenerating, the Eleventh Doctor exclaims "I'm a girl?" In the 2011 episode, "The Doctor's Wife", the Doctor recalls a Time Lord acquaintance known as the Corsair, who had at least two female incarnations. In the 2013 short, "The Night of the Doctor", the Sisterhood of Karn offer a dying Eighth Doctor control over his inevitable regeneration, with "man or woman" being touted as possibilities. The first on-screen cross-gender regeneration was shown in the 2015 episode, "Hell Bent", in which a white male Gallifreyan general regenerates into a black woman, who states that her previous incarnation was the only time she had been a man.
The most notable Time Lord to have appeared in both male and female forms prior to Whittaker's casting is the Doctor's nemesis, the Master, portrayed from 2014 to 2017 by Scottish actress, Michelle Gomez. This version of the character was known as Missy, short for "Mistress". The tenth series finale, "World Enough and Time" / "The Doctor Falls", addresses cross-gender regeneration several times; the Doctor tells his companion Bill Potts that Missy was "his first man-crush", and adds that he is only "fairly sure" he himself was male at the time, although the remark may have been flippant.
Two years prior to the announcement of Whittaker's casting, fans and scholars discussed the possibility of a female Doctor and analysed the benefits of such a regeneration.
Casting Whittaker
When referring to whether the new Doctor would be a woman, incoming Doctor Who showrunner Chris Chibnall originally was quoted in February 2017, as saying, "Nothing is ruled out but I don't want the casting to be a gimmick and that's all I can say". On 14 July 2017, the BBC announced that the portrayer of the Thirteenth Doctor would be revealed after the 2017 Wimbledon Championships men's finals on 16 July 2017. Whittaker was introduced as the Thirteenth Doctor on 16 July and subsequently made her debut in the 2017 Christmas special "Twice Upon a Time" and starring in the eleventh series. On Whittaker's casting, Chibnall said, "I always knew I wanted the Thirteenth Doctor to be a woman and we're thrilled to have secured our number one choice. Her audition for The Doctor simply blew us all away." Later on in his statement, Chibnall called Whittaker "an in-demand, funny, inspiring, super-smart force of nature" and said that she "will bring loads of wit, strength and warmth to the role."In an interview with Tenth Doctor actor and Broadchurch co-star David Tennant, Whittaker said she did not grow up watching Doctor Who and had decided against watching it to prepare for the role, saying: "I started to watch a bit during my audition process and I quickly decided that was not the way for me...It just made me panic... said to me, 'you're not coming in and playing the Doctor, you're playing the truth of the scene and the Doctor will come out of that'... so, that's what I did."
In November 2018, BBC confirmed that the twelfth series, Whittaker's second series, began production in November 2018. The series premiere aired on 1 January 2020. Whittaker continued on in the role for the thirteenth series.
Whittaker and Chibnall stated they would exit the show following the thirteenth series and three specials, which aired through 2022. Chibnall said "Jodie and I made a 'three series and out' pact with each other at the start of this once-in-a-lifetime blast. So now our shift is done, and we're handing back the Tardis keys. Jodie's magnificent, iconic Doctor has exceeded all our high expectations." She was succeeded by Tennant as the Fourteenth Doctor.
Characterisation
Interviewed by Radio Times, Chibnall described the Thirteenth Doctor as "absolutely the Doctor, but there's a new calibration, a new mixture of Doctorishness. The Thirteenth Doctor is incredibly lively, warm, funny, energetic, inclusive – she's the greatest friend you could wish to have as your guide around the universe." In the same article, Whittaker also added that her Doctor "speak at a hundred miles an hour," while actress Mandip Gill who plays companion Yaz Khan, commented that Whittaker's Doctor "has a similar energy to Matt Smith's Doctor... Very high energy. Jodie has that about her Doctor."Costume
In the clip in which the casting of Whittaker was announced, she wears a grey overcoat over a black hoodie. The first images of Whittaker's official costume as the Doctor were released to the media on 9 November 2017.The Thirteenth Doctor's costume features blue high-waisted culottes with yellow braces, a navy blue t-shirt with a rainbow stripe across it, a lilac-blue trenchcoat with a hood, brown lace-up boots, blue socks and piercings on her left ear. Some fans noted that the outfit had similarities to earlier Doctors' costumes, with others comparing it to Robin Williams' costume in the American sitcom Mork & Mindy.
Whittaker stated that she worked with the show's costume designer Ray Holman to come up with her outfit, inspired by a photograph that she had found online. The photograph had been published in a 1988 issue of Sassy showing a number of female models in men's clothing, with the specific photo of a woman in trousers, braces and a T-shirt, walking with a purpose. Whittaker said she "just love the androgyny of it, without it being masculine", and that "felt intriguing and kind of open to interpretation and I really love that". Additional elements drew out from the photograph. Whittaker wanted a coat that flowed with her actions and gave her pockets but otherwise did not have any fasteners, and she wanted some colour within the outfit but without going too "cartoonish". Holman added violet to the inside of the coat's sleeves, a reference to the violet-and-green colours of the Suffragettes.
Appearances
Television
The Thirteenth Doctor makes her debut in the final scene of 2017 Christmas special "Twice Upon a Time". After regenerating, The Doctor falls out of the TARDIS and, in series premiere "The Woman Who Fell to Earth", lands in modern-day Sheffield, where she befriends retired bus driver Graham O'Brien, his wife's grandson Ryan Sinclair, and police officer Yasmin "Yaz" Khan, with whom she successfully repels an alien hunter from the warlike Stenza race. The Doctor builds a device to return her to the TARDIS, but accidentally teleports her new friends with her; the group help retrieve the TARDIS on an alien world in "The Ghost Monument". After a trip to segregation-era Alabama in "Rosa", Graham, Ryan, and Yaz agree to being full-time companions in "Arachnids in the UK". Subsequent trips include visiting Yaz's grandmother in 1947; witnessing the partition of India in "Demons of the Punjab"; preventing a plan to kill millions galaxy-wide as part of a labour protest, in "Kerblam!"; and repelling an alien invasion alongside James VI and I in Jacobean Lancashire, in "The Witchfinders". In series finale "The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos", the Doctor is drawn into a second confrontation with the Stenza she faced in Sheffield. In the New Year's Day special "Resolution", her friends encounter a Dalek for the first time when it is awakened by archaeologists in Sheffield. The Dalek is defeated before it can signal a broader Dalek invasion of Earth.In "Spyfall", the Doctor faces off against the regenerated Master, who reveals that he has destroyed their home planet of Gallifrey in revenge for the Time Lords having lied to them about their species' origins, concerning a story of the "Timeless Child". In "Fugitive of the Judoon", the Doctor learns her former companion Jack Harkness has sent her a warning - "Do not give the Lone Cyberman what it wants" - just as she was encountering a past incarnation of herself, that she has no recollection of being. The Doctor ignores Jack's warning in "The Haunting of Villa Diodati", when the Doctor gives a partially-converted Cyberman from the future a compendium containing all knowledge of the fallen Cyber-Empire, in order to save the life of Percy Shelley and protect human history. The Doctor and her friends pursue the Lone Cyberman to the future and the aftermath of the Cyber-Wars in "Ascension of the Cybermen", where he has set in motion a plan to rebuild the Cyber-Empire and wipe out all life in the universe. As the last fragments of humanity face destruction at the hands of the Cybermen, the Doctor is pulled through a portal to Gallifrey by the Master in "The Timeless Children", where she learns of a radical cover-up of her origins: she is in fact the Timeless Child, an orphan from an unknown world whose unique power to regenerate was studied and replicated by her adopted mother, whose people used it to build the Time Lord empire. The Time Lords then forced her to work for them as an agent of the secretive "Division" for many years before erasing her memories. The Doctor defeats the Master's plan to conquer the universe with a new race of "CyberMaster" Cybermen-Time Lord hybrids, but is then arrested by the Judoon. She is broken out of prison by Jack Harkness in the New Year's Day special "Revolution of the Daleks", and with his help the TARDIS crew prevent an attempted takeover of Earth by clones of the Dalek discovered in Sheffield. Following this adventure, Jack, Ryan, and Graham choose to stay behind on Earth, leaving Yaz as the Doctor's sole travelling companion.
In Series 13, titled "Flux", the Doctor and Yaz are joined by new companion Dan Lewis as Swarm, an enemy from the Doctor's forgotten past as a Division agent, returns to take revenge upon her. At the same time, the Flux, a cosmic event that has the power to destroy entire galaxies, rips through the universe, and Sontarans, Daleks, Cybermen, and Weeping Angels begin amassing. Swarm and his sister Azure attempt to trap the universe in a loop where it will be continually destroyed by the Flux, while the Sontarans attempt to survive it by having the combined matter of the Daleks' and Cybermen's fleets absorb and stop the Flux. An alien race called the Lupari, meanwhile, defend the Earth from the Flux. The Doctor manages to split herself into three temporal entities, one letting herself be tortured by Swarm at Division, while the other two sabotage the Sontarans' plan so that they are destroyed with the Daleks and the Cybermen, before the Doctor safely redirects the Flux. The crisis concludes with Dan joining the Doctor and Yaz as a full-time companion, but the Doctor is troubled by a warning that her end is nearing. In "Legend of the Sea Devils", Yaz confesses to the Doctor that she holds romantic feelings for her, which the Doctor acknowledges but discourages Yaz from acting on, as it will only lead to heartbreak. In "The Power of the Doctor", the Master returns alongside his CyberMasters in an alliance with the Daleks to eliminate the Doctor once and for all by stealing her body through a forced regeneration. Although defeated narrowly by Yaz and some of the Doctor's friends and past companions, the Master is able to land a fatal laser attack on the Doctor. When her regeneration process starts, she chooses to spend some quality time with Yaz before parting ways with her one last time. Alone, the Doctor regenerates overlooking the view from Durdle Door, and finds the new new body is similar to the an old one.
In the Series 15 finale "The Reality War", she makes an appearance just before the Fifteenth Doctor uses his regeneration energy to shift the timeline back to normality and offers him a hand in doing so.