Current Doctor Who showrunner Chris Chibnall has received his fair share of backlash ever since taking over from Steven Moffat in 2017. But now, after the cliffhanger finale of season 12, a lot of people are asking the BBC to bring back the previous executive producer for Jodie Whittaker’s future runs.
As is the case with every beloved franchise, an era of transition is never easy for fans. Even Moffat had to deal with the same kind of backlash when Russell T. Davies and David Tennant left the show after four seasons. But to say that the Whovian fandom is now more divided than ever would simply be an understatement.
Chibnall has made a number of controversial decisions for the narrative of the rebooted series, most of which essentially undermined years of continuity. Whether it’s the Timeless Child that revealed the Doctor is not from this universe and there’ve been countless incarnations before William Hartnell’s 1st, or the fact that he/she can regenerate indefinitely, retconning the events of “The Day of the Doctor” and “The Time of the Doctor,” these new plot holes are things that Chibnall will have a hard time explaining in the future.
Now, a new petition recently launched on Change.org points out all of these issues that an estimable number of fans have been complaining about over the past two years, asking the network to fire the showrunner and bring back one of his predecessors. It also briefly commends Jodie Whittaker’s performance as the 13th and accuses Chibnall of turning her into a “political puppet” for the series’ alleged SJW agenda. Admittedly, it only has a handful of signatures at the time of writing, but it just went live yesterday and we imagine it’ll soon begin to pick up steam.
After all, the backlash is so overwhelming in scale that Doctor Who producer Matt Strevens had to address it in an interview earlier this year, so it’ll be interesting to see where the BBC decides to head from here on out. It certainly seems as if both Chibnall and Whittaker will be sticking around for the foreseeable future, though.
