It's a tale as old as time. Woke showrunners try to pander to the social justice-obsessed crowd by shoehorning radical leftist politics into the show and then the social justice-obsessed crowd turns on them. That's what you get when you try to please people who, by their own goals, refuse to be pleased. 

Now this is happening to the woke showrunners of "Doctor Who," a show that's careened to far to the left that it's landed itself in a viewership ditch it can't seem to crawl out of. Many of the classic British sci-fi's fans wandered away after the show's writers effectively abused the character, and the canon, and used it as a platform for message-first storytelling. 

But now there's a portion of its remaining fanbase that is highly displeased with the show. Why? Because it finally introduces a black, queer Doctor but did so with a white Doctor still around. 

Normally when a Doctor "regenerates" — a clever way of swapping out actors so the show can continue — the old actor morphs into the new actor, but during the episode "The Giggle," the Doctor undergoes a "bi-regeneration" where the new black Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) and the incumbent white doctor (David Tennant) are standing side-by-side by the end. 

This didn't please writer Charles Pulliam-Moore of The Verge who said the appearance of the new black Doctor was a "timey-wimey slap to the face" filled with "racist tropes":

When Gatwa was first announced as the actor who would be taking over the Doctor role following Whittaker’s three-series-long run, it felt like the BBC finally had the common sense to lean more into Doctor Who’s core ideas about imagination, exploration, and discovery across time and space. No matter how vehemently Doctor Who fans might want to deny it, the fact that the Doctor — a shapeshifting alien from a planet full of brilliant time travelers — was almost exclusively portrayed by white men until 2017 was small-minded, racist, and sexist in equal measure.

The racist trope in question? Pulliam-Moore believes that the new Doctor falls under the "magical negro" category: 

The trappings and optics of “The Giggle” also add an unfortunate kind of magical negro quality to Fifteen’s heart-to-heart talks with Fourteen, which is a concept that seems like it might be lost on Doctor Who’s writers room. The two Doctors defeat The Toymaker together, but the episode’s real emotional climax comes as Fifteen explains himself as the product of emotional healing that Fourteen hasn’t yet done. The concept of a time traveler “doing rehab out of order” certainly sounds cool on the page. But within the episode itself, it frames Fifteen less as his own person living for himself and more as a source of emotional support for Fourteen, who ends up being inspired by Fifteen’s sage wisdom.

What this boils down to is that Pulliam-Moore and those who agree with him are mad that the first black Doctor has to share the spotlight with a white Doctor, and a celebrated veteran of the role at that, making this a moment of stolen thunder. 

The truth is that this is what showrunner Russel T. Davies asked for when he began courting this social justice-obsessed crowd. As a white male, it's unlikely that Davies will be pleasing too many on the radical-left, especially while he's directing a black male. They will likely find more and more things to complain about until Davies abandons the role of director.

But when you play stupid games you win stupid prizes, and there's no stupider game than trying to appease ideological radicals who make it their purpose in love to find racism, sexism, and bigotry in every single thing they see. Davies will be eaten alive by the very monster he tried to feed.