Jodie Whittaker’s run as the Thirteenth Doctor is considered pretty weak overall. That wasn’t Whittaker’s fault, as she was fantastic (yes, she was). No, it was because of the scripts.
There are plenty of good episodes in Whittaker’s run (I like “Demons of the Punjab” and “The Power of the Doctor,” for example) but when her episodes were bad, they were so very bad. And one in particular isn’t just bad, it’s offensive.
That episode is “Spyfall Part 2.” It comes just after the season 12 opener, “Spyfall Part 1,” where a mysterious man named “O” reveals himself as the Doctor’s old enemy, the Master. This Master is played by Sacha Dhawan, a British-Indian actor.
As part of the Master’s plan to wipe out humanity, he time-travels to 1943 and teams up with the Nazis, pursuing the Doctor and her temporary companions Ada Lovelace (Sylvie Briggs) and Noor Inayat Khan (Aurora Marion). The Master is a being of pure evil and has no problem working with fascists. The Doctor intercepts the Master at the top of the Eiffel Tower, and that’s when everything goes horribly sideways.
The Doctor points out that the Master is presenting himself as a non-white man and so doesn’t fit the white supremacist ideals of the Nazis. The Master doesn’t care and tells the Doctor he’s using a perception filter so the Nazis see him as white.
The Doctor and the Master have an intense conversation where the Master tells his former friend that Gallifrey, thought to be safe in its bubble universe, has gone once more. But there’s no time to ponder that because the Master must be stopped. The Doctor has asked Noor Inayat Khan to send a message to the Nazis outing the Master as a spy, and they’re coming to get him. As they approach, the Doctor does something else—she disables the perception filter so the Master looks like a person of color once more. “Now they’ll see the real you,” she tells the Master before escaping.
In other words, the Doctor weaponized someone’s race to turn them over to the Nazis. It is, without a doubt, the most shockingly tone-deaf, poorly thought-out moment in Doctor Who’s entire modern run. Yes, the Doctor and the Master aren’t real people, but the Nazis were very real, and to use them in such a way is, to put it mildly, poor taste.
There was also no need for the Doctor to deactivate the Master’s perception filter in the first place since the Nazis were already coming for him. Why would a being meant to represent all things good do something so cruel to an already defeated enemy?
There are other problems with the episode; the complete waste of Sir Lenny Henry, the fact that Gallifrey is wiped out again after so much effort went into bringing it back—but they pale in comparison to that one moment. The Doctor uses another being’s race to punish them, an act that has horrifying real-world parallels. It was so bitterly disappointing.
Plenty of people have said that Jodie Whittaker deserved better than Doctor Who season 12, but Sacha Dhawan deserved much better.
