DOCTOR WHO: RUSSELL T. DAVIES HAS A BABY FETISH, and that’s not a good thing.

Now that Doctor Who is dead (for the time being), it’s worth taking some time out and taking a hard look at the themes and ideas of the Davies/Gatwa era.

In a word, it was: Babies. This was the running theme, and in hindsight, it’s blatant.

I’m going to say some harsh things here, about Davies and his themes, and it may offend, or upset, but I don’t care. Oh, and there will be spoilers. The series is over, it’s been a year, get over it.

It’s about babies. That was the big running theme of the last two seasons: Babies. In particular, it’s about the fetishization of babies and whatever they represent as some sort of ideal or aspiration, that represents the unsatisfied longings of a late middle aged, privileged man.

It’s not even particularly subtle.

Gatwa’s first series starts with Space Babies, and it ends with in the Reality War, with the Doctor turning the Universe on its ear, and rewriting the reality so that Belinda Chandra, the latest companion, is given fulfillment by having her life revised to become a Mommy. It turns out that a woman’s entire role, her reason for existing is to have a baby. Yay.

To hammer the point home, the lead character of Space Babies, Captain Poppy, is reborn as Poppy, Belinda and the Doctor’s Baby, and reborn yet again as Poppy, Belinda’s baby midwifed by the Doctor in some reality bending, closing the thematic loop back on itself.

It’s that unsubtle.

So let’s dig in. Literally, the first episode of the first season, is Space Babies, an episode devoted to the fetishization of beautiful, precocious super-intelligent babies who alternate between sophisticated and childish, their ‘heroics’ and their ‘barely there caretakers.’

I want to point out, it’s the first episode of the season. It’s the opening shot across the bow, the establishing episode, this is the episode that’s supposed to set the tone and the themes for the series. They didn’t have to do this. They had options, they could have done Boom, or Dot & Bubble. Davies could have done any number of things. This is the thing that he wanted to do, and this was important enough to Davies, that it was how he decided to start the season and launch the Gatwa era. So I think we’re obliged to take him seriously.

Except, it’s not exactly Gatwa’s first appearance as the Doctor. Let’s set aside the Giggle, where he shows up at the end. Gatwa’s first full appearance is the Church on Ruby Road, the Christmas Special where he hooks up with Ruby Sunday, the companion for the season. What’s it about? Well, it’s got two through lines — the emotional through-line is all about Ruby Sunday, who is an orphan, abandoned at steps of a church, raised by a surrogate mom, and her longing to find and connect with her biological mom. So, about babies.

By the way, Ruby’s surrogate mom? That’s what she does, her profession, her entire role, the entirety of her character, is being a surrogate mom to babies. She has no other personality and no other life that we get to see. It’s her entirety. Other companions, Rose Tyler, Martha Jones, had family who were family, they were people with their own lives, their perspectives and attitudes. Ruby’s Surrogate Mom has no other life and no identity beyond her role. About babies.

And the physical through-line? Babies. Specifically, it’s about time bending goblins stealing a baby to eat. They even have an entire camp song and dance number for it called “We’re going to eat that baby! Yum yum!”

So first two episodes, orphan baby grown up looking for her mom, surrogate mom raising babies, goblins stealing babies, rescuing baby, space babies on a space station, saving babies.

Ruby’s unresolved parental longing and angsty upbringing turns out to be critical to the first Gatwa series, as witnessed by the penultimate episode title — The Legend of Ruby Sunday, a mystery so profound that the Doctor must requisition the forces and technology of UNIT to try and solve it, thereby admitting the Big Bad into reality. And it turns out, that it’s a Conundrum which stumps the Big Bad as well, throwing him off his game so that the Doctor can win. In the end, the emotional arc of the first series is completed when the Universe is restored and Ruby finally gets to meet her birth mom.

Okay, fast forward to the final episodes, of the second series, Wish World and The Reality War. And here is where the fetishy through-line of baby-longing moves to outright creepy. You thought it was unsubtle before, hold on to your hats.

The villain is the Rani, who bi-regenerates herself from grandmotherly Mrs Flood, to a C-Suite, designer leather outted, girl-boss. She’s curt, decisive, 100% CEO, and has no time for all that trad-wife stuff. After making her appearance in the Interstellar Song Contest episode, she goes off to play the wicked Witch, visiting an Idyllic Rural family, with their Mom and Dad, who she dispatches to STEAL A BABY.

Yeah, we’re back to the Church on Ruby Road, full circle, with magical villains stealing babies from their mothers, and cracking time and space in the process. Not an accident.

It turns out that the Rani’s evil plan is to use the magic baby to rewrite reality, or to write a new reality overlaid on ours — a sort of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil-like world of conformity and pleasantness, but without gays, or disabled people or all those sorts.

I’ll give credit where credit is due, the production design and the feel is very reminiscent of Gilliam, very evocative, and to add a layer, there’s these mysterious gigantic bone monsters wandering around (forget the bone monsters, they don’t actually amount to anything. Apparently there was spare money in the CGI budget).

Gatwa’s Doctor is part of this world, transformed into a drone, blue pinstripe suit, office worker, utterly soul-less. Even his gay has been suppressed. But the Doctor is happy, because he has the most important thing in the universe: A daughter, Poppy, with Belinda. Is that name familiar? It’s a call back to Captain Poppy, the lead baby all the way back in Space Babies. Not an accident, but a deliberate linkage. The Doctor genuinely loves Poppy. He may have been turned into a cardboard cutout, but he’s okay, because he has his baby.

Belinda was a nurse, a person, an independent woman, but now she’s a cipher, she’s a stay at home mom. Every other aspect of identity is stripped away. She’s a Mom. And she’s happy as can be. They’re both completely happy.

Now, there’s a lot of plot, and it’s all pretty tosh. But basically, the Rani has created this fake Brazil-world in order to break reality open like cracking a walnut. Why? Well, because the Time Lords are all sterile, for reasons, they have no children.

Notwithstanding that the Doctor talks about themself and the Master as children in the Whittaker era. Notwithstanding that in the Capaldi era we meet the Doctor as a child. Notwithstanding that in the Day of the Doctor, with Tenant and Smith, we see children all over Gallifrey, and the two Doctors argue over how many children died. Forget all that, didn’t exist, Time Lords are sterile. The big plot of the big bad is a hare brained scheme to overcome sterility and restore babies to Gallifrey.

But of course, the Rani has the maternal instincts of a barracuda. She’s not coming near the Magic Baby. Instead, that’s given to a bloke named Conrad to care fore and be a Mr. Mom. In that sense, Conrad is awkwardly fitted into the role of avatar of Davies, the nurturing parent, while the Rani betrays her feminine maternal nature by being all Corporate Executive and Girl- Boss and having plans and schemes. She won’t even make a sandwich!

Oh yeah, and a word about the production design — the Rani and Mrs Flood live in a bone palace, where the decor, furnishing and structure are all dry white molded bone. The metaphor is obvious, this whole place is a stony, cold barren vagina, no place for a baby. It represents the anti-sexual, anti-femine life-choices of Flood, a dried up senior citizen, and the Rani, as go-go Girl-Boss. The castle is bone to represent sterility and an antithises to to life and fertility.

Like I said, none of this is subtle.

The problem for the Rani is that the Doctor is so happy to have a baby, he doesn’t want to leave the fake life. The Rani has to grab him and shake him up until he snaps out of it in order for the plot to happen. In short order:

The Doctor is so focused on saving his baby, Poppy, and Belinda, he locks them in a cupboard for the entire episode. So much for Belinda. Take that, feminism! Literally, the Doctor’s companion and personal and emotional foil for the season, the person who actually challenged the Doctor and tried to asert her independence and personhood starting in Robot Revolt, has been reduced to Stepford Tradwife AND THEN locked in the cupboard. Cripes!

The Rani’s scheme unravels, when her plan actually works as she intended, but instead of the salvation she was working working towards and that feminism promised, out comes a giant skeleton zombie and it eats her up. Take that, feminism!! So apparently, girl-bossing, independence, identity, all that just leads to failure, futility, sterility and this dead end where you get nothing and you’re zombie chow.

Conrad, former neglected child and bad guy turned Mister-Mom, is redeemed by his maternal instincts, and Ruby, the avatar of Motherhoodliness uses her Mother powers to turn him good, so that he lives happily ever after. Which makes sense because he’s Russell’s avatar, the stereotyped loving parent in the Rani’s household.

And finally, the Doctor sets everything to rights once again. Except no Poppy. It turns out that Poppy, this version at least, was just an artifact of the fake reality, she never existed at all, and the Doctor and Belinda don’t remember her.

But wait! Ruby Sunday remembers her. Ruby Sunday, as a lost baby herself, has such incredible baby senses, she can hear Poppy crying from outside the walls of reality. Well, Ruby is very concerned for imaginary babies, she gets Belinda and the Doctor to remember, and soon, something must be done!

The Doctor uses his magical powers to turn reality on its side again, rewriting reality to wish Poppy back into existence. Except this time, Poppy is Belinda’s and some random unknown bloke, because you know, the Doctor can’t be tied down. And the Doctor also rewrites reality so that Belinda was a Mom all along, and that’s all she ever was or wanted to be, not a nurse, not a person with her own life. The Universe, the entire Universe, has been rewritten so that Belinda can fulfill the role she was made for and embody her destiny as a … single mom. Whoever she was, whatever she wanted, junk all that. This is who she should be, and she’s happy, happy, happy! Take that, feminism!!!

So it turns out that the Gatwa era was all about the fulfillment of having a baby, the joys of parenthood. Not about changing diapers or cleaning up spit, or any of the awkward real life stuff. It’s all about the fetish of the baby, the inchoate longing for fulfillment, the empty place in life and souls that is meant to be filled by the baby. The baby as a source of meaning.

Of course, it’s not all about babies, not every episode. There are eighteen episodes between the seasons and specials. So they’re about other stuff.

For instance, Dot and Bubble is about how teenagers suck. I guess… babies are awesome, but teenagers suck? And Seventy-One yards is all about growing old and dying alone without a baby. Lux is about really young children’s Saturday morning cartoons. Lucky Day is about an unloved/ignored child/baby who grows up to be an angry jerk. Boom, about religion, death and a father’s love for a daughter. The special, Joy to the World is about Christmas, no connection to babies there.

Okay, bad examples.

But yeah, there are episodes that don’t relate back to babies somehow. For instance the Interstellar Song Contest, which is about genocide, and how complicated it is when it happens to people you don’t like and particularly if you can benefit from it, and also how it would be nice if the victims of genocide would just get over it get with the program, abandon their identity and turn their culture into a commodity for a nice song, so we can all be happy together.

There’s the Well, which as far as I can tell is about nothing at all. There’s Rogue, The Devil’s Chord. The Engine. There’s some episodes that don’t feed strongly into the them of fetishization of babies.

But overall, the series, when you drill into it is about this vague, entirely abstracted longing for parenthood, about babies as an idealized fulfillment. This is fetish. This is fetishization. There’s very little sign of any real awareness or involvement. This isn’t about someone with the experience of a parent wrestling with the complex realities of having or raising a child. No, this is abstract worshipfulness from a remote place.

It’s about an outsider longing, projecting his needs and desires. That’s why Ruby and Belinda are made into avatars of motherhood, that’s why Ruby’s surrogate mom is nothing but a surrogate mom, why Belinda is a nurse instead of a Doctor, why at the end of the episode, the Rani’s identity is repudiated and condemned as sterile and futile, and why Belinda’s identity is rewritten twice to make a mother. I kept saying “Take that feminism!” But really, that’s exactly what Russell T. Davies was doing. In his storyline, in his fetish, women are erased, their identities and aspirations are cast aside, their meaning in life is just babies, having them, looking after them, raising them right.

There’s no real role for men or fathers in Russell’s fetishism. That’s because it’s not about actual parenting. It’s about desire and longing for the baby. Not about the baby itself. Diapers? Geez, hire a nanny. Actual child rearing, that’s the woman’s job, the man has stuff to do. He’ll step in when he feels like it, when he feels the longing and the need for it, he’ll engage with the baby to have is needs met, and that’s male parenting.

So essentially, we’re back to patriarchal, stereotyped nonsense, the old misogyny and reduction of women and their roles and identity into a vehicle for service to male longing.

The sort of fantasies that are compelling to a rich, white, professionally super-successful, sixty year old, privileged man with no children or family and no problems, but an inchoate longing for fulfillment now that he’s hitting that stage of his life.

Look, I’m even sympathetic — I’m his age, I’m at that stage of my life, I’m alone (not nearly as successful) but I always wanted and dreamed of a family, of being a father, of having that life. Didn’t happen, que sirrah and all that. But I understand his angst and the longing that comes through. The difference is I don’t make it a fetish and turn men and women into empty ciphers as vehicles for that longing.

And people complain Doctor Who is woke? I mean, sure there’s the superficial performance of woke. There’s representation, there are trans and differently abled and minorities, they’re in there as long as they don’t get too many lines and stay in the background. There’s a gay Doctor and even a gay romance, as befits a gay showrunner. There’s the cartoonishly right wing bad guys. You got to give it to the Privileged class, they always know the talk to talk.

But that’s the surface. Dig a little deeper and it’s all about regressive morality and regressive social rolls, its about women having a place and how they would be happier in that place, and railing against damned disrespectful kids, and how the underclass should be seen and not heard and grateful for it. It’s not woke at all. In fundamental ways, Russell T. Davies vision and themes for his second era were deeply conservative, as we might expect from a wealthy, privileged old man at the top of the social pecking order.

I dunno. On the one hand, you kind of have to expect an artist is going to make art about the things they care about, the subjects that drive them and that they dwell on, that they have emotions about. So if Russell T. Davies is having some late-in-life paternity longing and angst, then yeah, okay I can see that this would come out in his work. It comes out in a really anvil-icious, ham handed clumsy way, admittedly. But sometimes that’s how it is. Genuine passion is what animates genuine art.

In this case though, I can’t help thinking that Russell T. Davies, and all the rest of us, would have been better off if he’d just taken it to a therapist to work it out with.