Alias and the disappointing ending

My partner and I just got through watching Alias. Yes, I know we're a little late to the game. We loved the first three seasons, but thought the show headed downhill in the fourth and the fifth. The show was cancelled unexpectedly in the middle of the fifth season, giving the writers just enough time to wrap up the story arc in a way that was faithful to their original vision. Unfortunately, the last eight episodes read more like a Cliff's Notes version of the finale rather than the finale itself.

The bones of a good story were there, but we feel the writers really neglected a lot of the potential they had going in. So we came up with a different ending. SPOILERS.

Rather than Nadia dying randomly from a collision with a glass table, Prophet Five's 'cure' should have made her awaken as a fervent Rambaldi acolyte and convince Arvin to take up his obsession again. The two of them should have gone together to Prophet Five. Then, during Sydney's confrontation with Arvin in the snow cave, she should have killed Nadia, cementing Arvin's drive to follow Rambaldi.

In Alias, Renée Rienne's 'father' has been in suspended animation for 30 years; when he awakens, APO discovers that his brain has been replaced by that of an evil scientist, Desantis. He is summarily executed by Renée and Jack in 'The Horizon'. This is a lot of effort put into a storyline that went nowhere. Instead of having Desantis's brain inside Renée's father's body, it should have been Rambaldi's brain. The whole thing should have been part of Rambaldi's plan for world domination by putting himself in hypersleep for 500 years while he waited for one of his plans to come to fruition--a plan involving the assembling of all the Rambaldi devices together into a giant weapon or something. Then, Prophet Five would actually be thralls of Rambaldi, his 'twelve apostles', trying to bring about his Second Coming. And Arvin would be his deluded prophet. It would all have a sense of symbolism and symmetry.

Rambaldi in Renée's father should escape from Jack and come back in the final episode. The final boss, who in Alias turns out to be Irina trying to destroy the world with nukes, should in fact be Rambaldi. What motivation does Irina have to blow up the world? None. That's silly. So, Renée should not have been killed ignominiously in an alley by Anna Espinosa; instead she should be killed nobly while helping stop Rambaldi's evil plan of blowing up the world with nukes. (These scenes figure Irina and Sydney, respectively, in Alias). They could still find the microchip in her body while she was still alive.

Meanwhile, Irina should not be evil. We have established that she's not trustworthy and that she's a really bad mom, and she cares more about her job than her family. But she's not evil. After Sydney left Jack to die in that touching scene, Irina should have showed up to help Jack defeat Arvin. Instead of Jack blowing himself up to stop Arvin, it should have been Irina sacrificing herself to save Jack. She has always loved Jack even though she betrays him time and time again. And this seems like it should have been her endgame all along, trying to stop Rambaldi even as Arvin tries to resuscitate him. This leaves Jack alive to be a part of Sydney's family--and especially her kids' family--in a way he was never able to be for Sydney, and would bring him redemption. He deserved a better end than he got, as did Irina. Arvin's end was fine though.

Finally, Sydney and Vaughn and the rest of the APO team should have been responsible for stopping Rambaldi, with Renée dying along the way to fulfill some vital function in a noble way. Sydney should be the one to finally bring him down, what with the prophecy and all, using a really great operation with disguises and hand-to-hand combat. Then, in the final confrontation where it's just her and Rambaldi, Sydney should beat him by using some final device given to her by Irina--maybe the Horizon?--to destroy one of Rambaldi's red energy ball things right when he's using it, blowing him up. Hooray! They ride off into the sunset, the end.

That would have been a better ending.

Oh, and torturing Kelly with snakes? Lame. Have her change her mind because of her former friend's persuasion, or because she has a change of heart when Rambaldi's evil plan is revealed, or something other than snake torture.

Why a female Doctor would be impossible

Fans of Doctor Who have long speculated about the possibility of a female version of the Doctor. The show itself made a nod to the possibility in the Series 6 episode "The Doctor's Wife". As a proponent of gender equality, a trans ally, and a firm advocate for more, stronger female characters in fiction, I feel I ought to embrace this idea enthusiastically.

But I don't. I can't help feeling that a female regeneration of the Doctor would be a disaster, and would be a betrayal of the essence of the show from both a Watsonian and a Doylist perspective.

To begin with the out-of-universe arguments, a female version of the Doctor would be automatically a Mary Sue. Just to review, the prototypical Mary Sue is:

exotically beautiful, often having an unusual hair or eye color, and has a similarly cool and exotic name. She's exceptionally talented in an implausibly wide variety of areas, and may possess skills that are rare or nonexistent in the canon setting. She also lacks any realistic, or at least story-relevant, character flaws — either that or her "flaws" are obviously meant to be endearing.

She has an unusual and dramatic Back Story. The canon protagonists are all overwhelmed with admiration for her beauty, wit, courage and other virtues, and are quick to adopt her as one of their True Companions, even characters who are usually antisocial and untrusting; if any character doesn't love her, that character gets an extremely unsympathetic portrayal... [Other] characters are quickly reduced to awestruck cheerleaders, watching from the sidelines as Mary Sue outstrips them in their areas of expertise and solves problems that have stymied them for the entire series.

Let's go down the list, shall we?

• He wears a variety of implausible costumes, including, in his Fourth incarnation, a scarf that defies physics. The pockets of his coat are "bigger on the inside".
• He doesn't have a real name, or rather, his real name is hidden for some desperate and mysterious reason. "River, you know my name. You whispered my name in my ear! There's only one reason I would ever tell anyone my name. There's only one time I could." ("Forest of the Dead")
• He speaks five billion languages ("The Parting of the Ways"), once built a TARDIS in eighteen minutes out of spare parts ("The Doctor's Wife"), and can save the universe using "a kettle and some string" (Children in Need Special). He has telepathic powers ("Planet of the Ood"), can regenerate his body so that he is effectively immortal ("The End of Time"), can easily recover from minor injuries such as losing a hand ("The Christmas Invasion") or cyanide poisoning ("The Unicorn and the Wasp"), and holds all of time in his mind ("The Fires of Pompeii").
• His friends are certainly awed by him. "He's like fire and ice and rage. He's like the night, and the storm in the heart of the sun. He's ancient and forever. He burns at the center of time and he can see the turn of the universe. And... he's wonderful." ("The Family of Blood")
• "But if Martha Jones became a legend then that's wrong, because my name isn't important. There's someone else. The man who sent me out there, the man who told me to walk the Earth. And his name is The Doctor. He has saved your lives so many times and you never even knew he was there. He never stops. He never stays. He never asks to be thanked. But I've seen him, I know him... I love him... And I know what he can do." ("Last of the Time Lords")
• He has had romantic relationships with Madame de Pompadour ("The Girl in the Fireplace"), Marilyn Monroe ("A Christmas Carol"), Elizabeth I ("The End of Time"), Lady Mary Wortley Montague ("Smith and Jones"), and Cleopatra ("The Girl in the Fireplace"), and in fact most of the women he meets are inexorably drawn to him.
• He "makes people better". ("Journey's End") His only flaws are egotism (but adorable egotism! And largely deserved, considering...), endearing ignorance of Earth customs, and a propensity to sacrifice others (for the greater good!).

In other words, the Doctor is the most amazing badass of all time. But why is it that the male Doctor is the best character ever, while a female Doctor--try replacing all the male pronouns with female ones--would be a Mary Sue? That would be the patriarchy.

It was almost as if male characters were forgiven for being implausibly plastic because they upheld stereotypically male virtues such as toughness, courage, and heterosexual promiscuity. And while men have finally begun to demand more realistic protagonists, making Marty Stu somewhat less acceptable it is still clear that Marty Stus still get passes far more frequently than Mary Sues resulting in quite a fair number of male canon sues who conversely are praised rather than criticized. Part of this may be due to Most Fanfic Writers Are Girls as well as Most Writers Are Male. Both female and male writers for analogous but different reasons tend to like such characters.

Now, I believe that it is only in creating well-written female characters that are the equivalent of male ones that equality of the genders in fiction can be achieved; that is, I'm not making the fallacious argument that because there are no good female heroes that we shouldn't write female heroes. However, I do think if we were going to do so, we'd need a writer with a lot more sensitivity to sexism than Steven Moffat. I won't even mention the fact that undoubtedly, due to the vagaries of television casting, a female Doctor would be beautiful, changing the character from a recipient of admiration to an Object of the Male Gaze.

Now on to the in-universe, or Watsonian, arguments for why a female Doctor would not be a good idea.

We have little information on the biology of Time Lords' reproduction. We know they experience childhood ("The Sound of Drums") and form families based on genetic relatedness (the Doctor states that he has been a father in "The Doctor's Daughter"). The fullest information on Time Lord reproduction is of dubious canonicity (from the Virgin New Adventures novel Lungbarrow) and states that Time Lords are grown on genetic looms and emerge as adults, a form of asexual reproduction. Therefore it is not really possible to say whether the Doctor is genetically male, since we don't know if Time Lords even can be said to possess biological sex, let alone whether they possess the two sexes humans are familiar with. For all we know, any of the Doctor's regenerations may have been biologically female.

The key here is that he has always presented himself as male in terms of gender. Clearly, however their biology works, Time Lords have a very strong gender binary in their society. Witness the fact that the species name is different depending on whether the individual presents as male (Time Lord) or female (Time Lady), but a group of individuals is labeled Time Lords no matter the gender of the individuals. Time Ladies wear different hairstyles and makeup than Time Lords, and they dress differently.

They also have differing voices and body types.

Time Lords have a higher percentage of men than women in government (only three of the approximately 20 known Presidents have been female). The Doctor himself shows awareness of the existence of sexism ("The Idiot's Lantern") and displays occasional idiosynratic misogyny ("The Wedding of River Song"). In fact, though Time Lord society is very advanced in many ways, they appear to be similar to humanity in the rigidity of their gender binary and patriarchy. Perhaps this is part of the reason the Doctor feels so comfortable in human society.

His quaint attempts to choose clothing appropriate to the time and place he visits never show him attempting to present as female. His hairstyles, dress, and speech all signify maleness, both in Time Lord society and among humans. His behavior is also marked as male; he often exhibits the subtly gendered "theory boy" persona, as well as a refusal to express emotions such as love ("Journey's End"), sadness ("The Runaway Bride") and fear ("The Satan Pit") to his friends, although it's clear from his behavior that he does experience them.

All this goes to show that a major part of the Doctor's performed identity throughout all his incarnations is maleness, which has similar signifiers in both human and Time Lord society.

It also seems unlikely that the Doctor is uncomfortable with his gender identity. It is true that many transgender folks may not transition until late in life, due to the powerful gender binary and justifiable fear of rejection by their loved ones and their society. However, the Doctor's lifestyle completely avoids these mitigating factors. Almost every day of his life, he arrives in a new place where no one knows him or has heard of him before--there has been no societal pressure for him to continue presenting as male, if he didn't want to. Plus, he has had nearly 1000 years to make up his mind. One of his mentors and friends, the Corsair, was known to transition multiple times, and the Doctor's attitude towards him/her indicates that he had no internalized prejudices toward a trans identity, if he had wanted to claim one as well. Finally, after the events of the Time War, the Doctor was literally the last member of his species in the universe. No family members or friends would ever interact with him again, yet he still continued to present as male.

In other words, one part of the Doctor's identity which is held constant throughout all his incarnations is his maleness. Like his curiosity, nonviolence, intelligence, egotism, and strong moral code, maleness is an important part of his identity as he performs and experiences it. For him, presenting as female would be just as out-of-character as taking up arms.

A further consideration is the Doctor's sexual orientation. A fair amount of fan interest in seeing a female Doctor is underlied by the assumption that she would primarily be interested in men, as the male Doctor is primarily interested in women. However, though the Doctor is touched by men's attraction to him and has no problem with it, he does not reciprocate it on any occasion ("The Parting of the Ways", "Closing Time", "The Sound of Drums"). Meanwhile, he demonstrates romantic attraction to Rose Tyler, Madame de Pompadour, Astrid Peth, River Song, and Matron Joan Redfern--and that's just in the rebooted series. He also overwhelmingly chooses women as companions. Interest in women as friends and romantic partners is another part of the Doctor's identity that stays constant throughout all of his incarnations. And though people's sexual orientations sometimes do change during a gender transition, it is not by any means assured. I somehow doubt that the fans that call for the Doctor to regenerate as a woman realize she could just as easily be a lesbian as a straight woman.

To conclude both the Watsonian and the Doylist arguments, all that we have seen of the Doctor's presented identity is as male. A transition to female would be out-of-character for him, and textually would have no support in the form of foreshadowing or thematic suggestion. If the writers of Doctor Who wanted to engage the question, I would support casting a trans man actor as the Doctor, or a female actor in drag. Both of these would be plausible depictions given what we know of the Doctor and of Time Lord society and biology (e.g. if the Doctor regenerated in a biologically female body and continued to present himself as male). And barring a transition to female, I would not support a change of sexual orientation for him. Genetics aside, attraction to females has historically been a prominent part of his identity.