Posted in: BBC, TV | Tagged: bbc, chris chibnall, doctor who, Gentleman Jack, HBO, jodie whittaker, russell t davies, sally wainwright

Gentleman Jack Season 2 Did "Who" Better Than Doctor Who: Flux Did

The second season of Gentleman Jack has been full of comedy, intrigue, drama, surprises, and… well… all the things Doctor Who: Flux should have had but sorely lacked. If you squint, you might see that Gentleman Jack Season 2 has been a better series of Doctor Who than "Flux."

Yeah, yeah, Gentlemen Jack is a period drama. It stars Suranne Jones as Anne Lister, a real-life landowner & polymath who lived in 1830s Yorkshire and kept a heavily-coded diary that documented her various lesbian relationships in the days before the word "lesbian" even existed. "Gentleman Jack" was a derogatory old England slang for women who pursued and seduced other women. The title of the show reclaims the name empowerment for gay women. The show focuses on Lister's marriage to a wealthy heiress and landowner, Ann Walker, played by Sophie Rundle. It should be noted that while male homosexual activity was illegal in England until the mid-20th Century, female homosexuality was never illegal because Queen Victoria didn't believe it existed. While kept secret and not legally recognized at the time, theirs was perhaps the first same-sex marriage in British history.

How can we compare Gentleman Jack to Doctor Who, you may ask? You might think we were looking for any excuse to write about Doctor Who, and you would probably be right. After all, why not? Is it a stretch? Perhaps, but a lot less than you think. For starters, Gentleman Jack recreates the past as Science Fiction. It presents history as a world somewhat alien to our present, with its rules and mores quite different from ours. The show changes our understanding of history in similar ways historical episodes of Doctor Who subvert what we might have thought we knew about history. It uncovers a secret chapter in LGBTQ history in unearthing the life of Anne Lister and restores her significance as a lesbian icon. Jodie Whittaker's Doctor is also an LGBTQ hero, though the scripts nervously tip-toed around that where Gentleman Jack placed Anne Lister's gender non-conforming status front-and-centre.

Suranne Jones previously appeared on Doctor Who when she played a literal embodiment of the TARDIS in an episode written by Neil Gaiman. You get a hint of how Jones might have played The Doctor in Gentleman Jack. Her signature long black coat and boots would have been a good costume for her Doctor. She had a companion in Ann Walker. Her outsider status and appearance, her strident, proactive, restless curiosity, and passion for traveling are very reminiscent of the Doctor. She walks through a ruined town torn apart by political violence and rioting and deftly escapes violence through her wit and nerves of steel. She has the ability to walk into any room and take it over with her authority and breadth of knowledge. She was adept at manipulating people into doing what she wanted through wit, unstoppable logic, and sheer force of will. The scene where she tells a class of young girls of the joys of Mathematics and Science and the pursuit of knowledge is also very Doctor-like, recalling Peter Capaldi's Doctor lecturing a class full of university students about Time and Space. She also displayed strategic cunning, and it was gratifying to see her defeat her enemies like Ann Walker's greedy and homophobic brother-in-law Sunderland by trapping him in his lies. Season 2 of Gentleman Jack was a lot more fun to watch than Doctor Who: Flux. Somebody could easily take the scenes of Jones as Anne Lister walking around Yorkshire and edit together a CGI mash-up where she's walking in and out of the TARDIS, and it would totally look like Doctor Who.

During 2021, the internet was full of rumours that Sally Wainwright was being tapped to become the next showrunner of Doctor Who after Chris Chibnall. It's possible she was approached, and just as possible, this was a rumour planted by Russell T. Davies when the BBC agreed to take him on as Chibnall's successor. In a strange sort of way, we got a version of Sally Wainwright's Doctor Who in Suranne Jones in Gentlemen Jack.

Gentleman Jack is on HBO in the US. Too bad HBO unceremoniously canceled it, though the BBC hasn't in the UK and is considering finding a new co-production partner to continue the series.

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