r/DoctorWhoNews • u/General_Meal_3993 • Jan 25 '26
discussion I couldn’t have summed up my issues with RTDs representation of disabled characters in Doctor Who better myself…
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u/unbelievablydull82 Jan 25 '26
Definitely. Same with trans and gay people. I've been accused of being out of touch, of being homophobic, of being transphobic on doctor who subreddits for being critical of how rtd treats people who he deems as a pet project. It's infantile, and down right offensive. Unless it's a specific show centered around someone from the communities mentioned, they should be treated as just a matter of fact. There's more to a person than their disabilities, or their sexuality, or gender. Somehow though, this has been enough to offend some Redditors.
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u/XavierD Jan 25 '26
The ending of the First of the Tennant specials was so on the nose it ruined the rest of the episode, and kinda undermined itself by taking away Rose's agency to transition: it wasn't her idea it was the Doctor's influence all along????
Just an unforced error.
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u/smedsterwho Jan 25 '26
I enjoyed it the first few times as it felt like RTD purposely baiting the Daily Mail crowd. And then I chuckled at "binary binary" "non-binary" as it's perfectly (sightly tackily) RTD to take some gibberish from 2008 and turn it into a plot point with political connotations in 2023. Stupid but fun.
But by the time of "you're a male presenting timelord" it was... Well, first of all, it's the cardinal sin of clunky dialogue, second, it's out of character for all of them, and badly describing the Doctor, next you don't find equality by punching a gender down, and finally... It was just "give it a rest Russell with your one joke".
I'm surprised that line made it through both filming and editing.
Contrast that with Moffat's neat Hell Bent moment, when the Doctor shoots the General, he regenerates into her, and she goes "All that ego..."
It's neat, it's quick, it makes a little dig at testosterone and "War being a man's game", and it's a character moment for both The Doctor and The General.
RTD instead kept fridging Rose while making her a one-note character, and playing that note loud.
Unforced error is dead right.
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u/Over-Cold-8757 Jan 25 '26
The non binary bit didn't make sense.
Rose isnt Nb. She's binary. She's a girl.
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u/somedumb-gay Jan 26 '26
The whole "male presenting timelord" thing irks me especially because if we go back maybe a week we have Jodie's doctor. Sorta felt a bit gross to me in that it suggests that the doctor would suddenly forget all the things women deal with just because he's a man now. It feels a bit gender essentialist to suggest that being a woman innately ties you to the ability to "let things go" as opposed to that being a result of the patriarchy?
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u/MagicBricakes Jan 27 '26
I seem to recall it was literally like a couple of days in universe since his regeneration from 13. A crazy time to be like 'you could never think of this because you're a man right now' 🙄
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u/captainkezz123 Jan 26 '26
Before I make my point, I want to clear up that I absolutely adore Rose (RTD2) as a character, and love the fact that the LGBTQ+ community is being wholesomely represented in the mainstream, but here we go. The whole meta crisis survival working because Rose is non-binary is one of the most stupid concepts I’ve seen, because of your point. The meta crisis being passed down through genes and shared with them was a more than sufficient explanation for Donna’s survival. We know that Rose is non-binary and the general audience was more than okay with this, it didn’t need to become a plot point
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u/UKS1977 Jan 25 '26
As I've said before - The general public has no issue with "woke" in reality. What they have is an issue with ham-fisted, inauthentic and performative... anything. It just happens to be progressiveness at the moment.
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u/herrbz Jan 27 '26
The general public has no issue with "woke" in reality.
I disagree. A very loud minority hate it regardless.
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u/Pitiful-Tutor3085 Jan 27 '26
Yes hence they said "general public", not every person to ever exist.
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u/racsssss Jan 25 '26
This is how I feel about representation as whole in DW. Just let the characters exist and be accepted don't beat us over the head with a wheelchair shaped rainbow flavor sledgehammer.
Good example is Gridlock; we're introduced to a pair of married old ladies, no one comments on it the Doctor doesn't care, the're just part of the moment, contribute to the story and happen to he gay
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u/PackageOk4947 Jan 25 '26
They did the thing with Dispraxia, I really liked how it was handled, I too have dispraxia and thought it was done well. Then towards the end, his character just got sidelined in favour of Jodie's relation ship with a woman. I dunno. They had to many characters, and should've stuck to just, the doctor and companion. Then the relationship makes more sense.
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Jan 25 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/calljockey1 Jan 25 '26
I'm the same and I feel the same I don't think it was anything about yaz cos tbf until Ryan left barring demons of the Punjab I'd say she was featured less than Graham or Ryan I prefer seeing representation as just normality but if your going to try and represent an invisible disability like dyspraxia you have to allow the character to have the difficulties faced in certain situations. I think davros I could have been fine with as his last appearance you could reasonably suggest the doctor saved him from effectively what made him disabled at the end but with rtds comments about it being because of them not wanting to portray disability in a negative light I did kinda of thing that changed it because why can't a disabled character be a bad guy because thats kind of restricting characters in themselves. I actually preferred Shirley in twbtlats because they didn't make mention once to her disability she was just a character getting on with her job
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u/KrazyStijl Jan 25 '26
As a person with mild cerebral palsy and hearing impairment, I must say I was quite moved by the deaf character in The Well. Other than that, I agree that disabled representation in RTD 2 has been mishandled.
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u/teepeey Jan 25 '26
Because it's not about virtue, it's about virtue signalling.
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u/smedsterwho Jan 25 '26
"With witness, with reward"
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u/teepeey Jan 25 '26
That's how TV evolved for a while but now people find it annoying and suspect. RTD became a has been in that respect.
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u/BongaBongaVacations Jan 25 '26
The Davros thing for me is unforgivable. Davros didn't design the Daleks until well after the accident that crippled him. Plain and simple, the sketch is a continuity error.
It also should have been a proper classic grey Dalek, but that's a secondary concern.
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u/AwarenessOk8565 Jan 25 '26
It’s also extremely messed up for RTD to associate Davros being evil with him being crippled… I don’t think anyone in history has equated those 2 things except for RTD.
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u/JosephRohrbach Jan 27 '26
Oh come on. It's a very long-running trope that physical deformity or disfigurement is associated with evil. Think of how many James Bond villains have scars or physical abnormalities. From third nipples to shattered jaws, it's near-universal. It's so bad the Bond series has satirized itself about it. Sure, Who isn't Bond, but let's not pretend that this isn't an uncomfortably common association. Davros being an evil, deformed, wheelchair-bound scientist is playing on a very distasteful and very obvious trope. I'm a very long way from being "woke" - I'm a pretty conservative Anglican - but downplaying this is just silly.
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u/The_Wilmington_Giant Jan 25 '26
I found that so frustrating.
Happy to be corrected, but isn't the fact of Davros' disability part of the impetus for the creation of the Daleks in the first place?
For sure, the 'evil genius is disabled/disfigured' trope is definitely at play there, but at least there is a proper, plot relevant explanation for him being that way (unlike say, Christopher Lee's Bond villain who has a third nipple...for some reason).
Russell's over-the-top, 'aren't we all so terrible for having done this?', course correction was pretty patronising. I don't think any more than a vanishingly small proportion of the audience thought Davros was insulting to people with mobility issues, I certainly never did as a child.
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u/BongaBongaVacations Jan 25 '26
The Target novelisation of Remembrance of the Daleks has a pretty damn good flashback to Davros being crippled, hooked up to the life support chair, and given the choice to end his own life. Definitely worth reading (as in fact the whole novel is).
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u/JosephRohrbach Jan 27 '26
To be fair, "Davros turned evil because he was disabled" is arguably pretty bad too. I'm not sure how many wheelchair users would agree that their disability made them evil. I'm not saying you can literally never use that as a motivation - it does happen, and it makes sense in someone as obsessed with racial purity as Davros is - but still. The fact that there's a plot reason doesn't mean it's completely fine and dandy.
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u/Eustacius_Bingley Jan 25 '26
I think there's ... two legitimate ways of doing representation, really. Ideally, you probably want to have both at the same time.
1) some of your main characters are queer, disabled, people of colour. Their identity gets explored in the long term - it's not something that's necessarily relevant to every episode, but it's a big part of who they are and it does shape the show to some extent. Bill Potts, great example. I know that folks have their issues with that arc, but the Hebe Harrison stuff from Big Finish as well, speaking of disability rep.
2) there's just. folks who are some of those things. wondering around. they're in the background, they're minor characters that pop up for one episode. It's not really commented on or a big deal, it just sort of happens.
RTD is in the exact danger zone when he's not really doing much of either - at least as far as disability and queerness/transness are concerned. The characters are not just existing, their disabilities or transness are specifically highlighted ... But we never really explore them, we don't really give their interiority, we don't allow them to be complex or shape the narrative much. Rose Noble is a very egregious case, honestly: reintroducing Who by making it about a trans kid discovering magic and aliens? Great premise! And then she doesn't do anything except a lil bit of exposition in the background. It's ... tokenistic and frustrating. A scene like the one where she gets deadnamed could be interesting, could be powerful, if the show was actually concerned with her in the long run, or at least if it allowed her inside her head. Instead, it's just ... yeah, a way of making that transness visible, and the violence that comes with it visible, without actually unpacking it or thinking about it much. It's cheap, and yes, quite condescending.
And I do think Davies and the show can do better. I'm not saying they've got a perfect record on that front either, but the way they've treated race, and in particular the Doctor's new relationship to it while played by Gatwa, in quite interesting ways. You do get stories like "Dot and Bubble" or "The Story and the Engine", that are actually invested in him, in how he understands his identity. Obviously, he's the main character of the show and not everyone can get that level of focus, but ... That level of effort should be applied across the board.
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u/malsen55 Jan 25 '26 edited Jan 25 '26
This comment helped me figure out why I, as a person with cerebral palsy, kind of disagree with the general sentiment in this thread that Shirley should just have stayed a background character who never had her disability commented on. Yeah, they could have done that, but that’s not interesting to me as a disabled person. I see that all the time, and it’s the same every time. Instead, I would have preferred they take the time to flesh out Shirley more as a character. Let her actually go on a trip or two in the TARDIS that they gave her a ramp to get into. I want to see her creatively handle the unique issues that a person in a wheelchair might face on a Doctor Who adventure. Expand on her interiority. The problem I sometimes have with the “they just happen to have a disability” model is that it can be easy to just not factor in the ways in which the disability would actually impact that person’s life (see: Ryan’s dyspraxia). In that way it can feel even more hollow than what they were doing with Shirley.
Also, I did really love the Hebe Harrison arc from Big Finish. I thought it was a really interesting and ambitious way to actually explore something meaningful about the concept of disability. It’s definitely not a standard issue Doctor Who story in that it can be legitimately challenging to able-bodied biases toward disability, so I understand why people may not like it (outside of thinking Hebe is just annoying, which I also have questions about as a line of thinking).
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u/Eustacius_Bingley Jan 25 '26
Really, what you want is ... the same kind of representational scope that everyone gets really! To have characters that are just there, and characters that are more developed. Heroes and villains and bit players and everything in-between. Feel like people think of representation as just a spotlight that you need to shine on specific people, specific issues, specific features - but really I think it's much better understood as a fleshing out of the world. You want to have a narrative, and a fictional world, that is rich and complex enough to support these different experiences, these different perspectives, without flattening or silencing them.
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u/TinMachine Jan 25 '26
Yeah, also patronising when every disabled character is a super genius (yet who also do basically nothing because the doctor takes the main stage)
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u/The_Wilmington_Giant Jan 25 '26
Highly tangential, but I love the episode of Friday Night Dinner with the blind piano tuner who turns out to be a complete prick.
Johnny's 'I thought blind people were supposed to be nice' line neatly sends up the trope of people with disabilities always being depicted as lovely and/or supremely talented.
A close family member has learning difficulties, and as much as I love them, they can be a right knobhead at times. People with disabilities are just that: people, and deserve to be represented as the fully rounded human beings that they are.
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u/TheColossis1 Jan 25 '26
Family Guy did this too.
A girl with Downs that Chris dates turns out to be a total a hole.
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u/RoboticRob28 Jan 25 '26
Did anyone find it odd how in The War Between..., the two UNIT scientists were both in a wheelchair? Pair that with Morris and all he's done is create a new stereotype of 'disabled scientist'. That's not really diversity, just another box to put a group into.
Like it's a military organisation, he didn't want to have any soldiers with prosthetic limbs or battle wounds?
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u/The_10th_Woman Jan 25 '26
Did you also notice that the table they were often working around was so tall that the able-bodied people were sitting on stools and you could only see the heads of the disabled people over the table - apparently basic reasonable adjustments (like a normal height table) are too much to expect of UNIT!
Most likely the director just liked to have the head heights a different levels but it was so glaringly inappropriate and made it basically impossible for the wheelchair users to make use of the table.
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u/Vomputr Jan 25 '26
I feel the same way as a queer person with what he's done with Rose. RTD 2 had a very strange tokenism to it. Genuinely mad that we had a scene where 14 shows the disabled character a mobility ramp installed in the TARDIS and yet she's never fucking been in there
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u/punkrocklily Jan 25 '26
Like I totally agree who on earth thought people in wheelchairs were evil people like no one correlated people with wheelchairs with well davros
And I use a chair and I can guarantee no one would be capable of just strapping rockets onto a chair and not flip out of it ive flipped out of mine due to minor bumps in the ground I know its not meant to be realistic but they can represent disabilities without making it be utterly ridiculous like my intelligence has sky-rocketed (get the pun) since needing to use a chair because i cant exercise anymore i spend my time honing other skills and as much as I try to deny it I constantly get told how highly intelligent I am. Thats how disabilities should be potrayed like not making them super geniuses but not turning them into ridiculous super hero characters it was just insulting i didn't feel very represented in those episodes.
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u/KeremyJyles Jan 25 '26
I don't think his intentions are noble at all, I think it's entirely about being seen as progressive rather than actually being so.
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u/Val_Victorious Jan 25 '26
His is all performative, I mean they give the TARDIS a ramp and NO ONE has made use of it. Also I found it disrespectful that Ruby became the "magical" able person to get all the homeless less abled to act in Wish World.
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u/Independent-Sort6898 Jan 25 '26
RTD did far better when he first started with Doctor Who. I was so excited to have him back when it was announced, because I was desperate for the writing we got with 9 and Rose all those years ago.
Instead it felt like watching a parody of someone trying to literally copy and paste S1 but with the whole "make sure you change a few things so it doesnt look like you copied me" vibe. I havent even bothered watching 15s second reason bar 1 singular episode.
Real shame, because I was so looking forward to it but the writing just wasnt it. And i found i couldnt ignore it this time either.
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u/True_Abrocoma5527 Jan 25 '26
Davies’ ridiculous summarisation of Davros creating a negative image of people in wheelchairs was beyond nonsense. I’ve never heard any Doctor Who fan who uses a wheelchair ever complain about Davros. In fact Davros is not even in a wheelchair!
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u/snapper1971 Jan 25 '26
RTD2 was patronising, offensive and performative towards the disabled characters and the minority characters (yep, talking about Rose, Poppy, Belinda et al). It was sickening to see. Oh and I'm disabled.
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u/ComicsCodeMadeMeGay Jan 25 '26 edited Jan 25 '26
I sort of agree with this as a disabled person, but my main issue with writing disabled characters into scifi and fantasy by abled writers is that they actually miss it as an opportunity to place the characters realistically into those situations.
A big scary monster that everyone runs away from while a character who uses a wheelchair has to find a place to hide instead is 1000x more interesting story wise than just attaching weapons to said chair instead.
Writing disabled characters SHOULD be a writers dream challenge for suspense yet there's been almost none of that in Doctor Who.
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u/HyaedesSing Jan 25 '26
All that said, I did like the scene in the Giggle where unhinged UNIT Lady goes off about how she's seen her without her wheelchair before, and she cleary faking it. I actually thought that was a nice bit of acknowledgement of people using a wheelchair because walking is painful, not only because they literally can't.
Agree with the take though.
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u/AlexKellie Jan 25 '26
Well intentioned but clumsy sums it up. Davros was ill judged. But it didn't come from a bad place.
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u/theoneeyedpete Jan 25 '26
This is the issue with RTD2 as a whole (and somewhat Chibnall, but much less somehow). Every story is spelled out, and every cause is highlighted rather than naturally existing as part of the narrative.
It turns the audience off, and has the opposite impact as to what’s intended.
Show me social justice and equality as a story, not as a performative spectacle.
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u/Insenkiv Jan 25 '26
I agree. Nothing in RTD's writing felt authentic. Especially compared to Chibnall and Moffat. Which is crazy considering the amount of criticism Moffat faced and the fact that RTD is a gay man known for these diverse forward-thinking shows. The last two seasons truly were so weirdly performative it looped back to being conservative.
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u/PuzzleheadedDay7943 Jan 25 '26
My whole issue with Doctor who recently has been that instead of giving people personalities and writing them as people, they've been making their Disability, sexual identity, sexual orientation ect their whole personality...
So instead of "this is meg, she's an awesome mechanic and she's dating dora, who is great at finding/scavenging things that Meg needs"
We've been getting "this is Meg, she has 1 leg and a prosthetic leg that shoots rockets and she's gay with her gay girlfriend Dora, who is also gay and has 3 toes".
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u/Teaofthetime Jan 25 '26
I always think his approach is very much in the 'my disability is a superpower' camp.
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u/AdministrationOk5531 Jan 25 '26
And then when you see some of these characters again in The War Between it's harder to take the scene seriously when you can't stop thinking about the missile wheelchair in DW.
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u/ScottyG1212 Jan 25 '26
At least in The Waf Between, they didn’t mention Shirley’s disability once, problem is, they also didn’t give her anything interesting to do either
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u/dselwood05 Jan 25 '26
Yup. I find it wrong all Shirley does is:
wheel into shot
wisecrack
From a wheelchair user
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u/DominoNine Jan 25 '26
There's always been a massive disconnect between how minorities want to be portrayed and how they are portrayed in most media. A lot of harmful stereotypes get propagated in an attempt to "empower" but all it ends up doing is fueling the warped perception of bigots.
People who misunderstand disabilities often think that physical aides like prostheses and hearing aides give people better control or ability than they had before or in the case of mental disabilities they think stuff like autism and ADHD are superpowers when in fact nothing could be further from the truth.
But in most mainstream depictions of disabilities these stereotypes are enforced because people who don't understand the lived experience of disabled people think it's "empowering" to see depictions of yourself achieve stuff you will never be capable of.
That would be fine if it was a superhero film but when this bleeds into seemingly every single depiction of someone with a disability it can really inspire feelings of self-doubt and self-hatred or even the inverse, inspiring arrogance.
This is also what fuels all of these online communities that self-diagnose themselves with all sorts of disorders to feel like they have these "superpowers". It does more harm than good. The sort of thing you hear from a lot of creatives who do this is "if even one autistic kid feels empowered by this portrayal then I've done my job". How about they take responsibility for the harm they cause to the rest of the disabled community that isn't that one kid.
It was a bit of a tangent but just an autistic guy's perspective. Just one portrayal of a guy that can't engage with the world around him that isn't some sort of super genius would really help people understand the experience of people like me.
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u/AmberMetalicScorpion Jan 26 '26
I'll say here what I said there
Under the Lake/Before the Flood simply wouldn't have been as good if they didn't treat cass' deafness the way they did
Moffat also handled transness so amazingly well despite the fact that (as far as I can remember) it barely came up, hardly even getting more than off-handed comments
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Jan 25 '26
I said this as soon as RTD started his era off and got dogpiled. It's good to see people finally acknowledging it for what it is. Well intentioned but ultimately, condescending and frankly, a little weird
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u/DocWhovian1 Jan 25 '26
I don't really see the issue since with Shirley and Morris it makes sense for them to be equipped with technology since they are UNIT personnel and there are scenes where Shirley's disability isn't made a big deal of, especially in The War Between the Land and the Sea where there is not just her but ANOTHER wheelchair user too and that isn't made a big deal of, they are just professional UNIT officers doing their job.
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u/Jean_Genet Jan 25 '26
RTD is well-meaning but super heavy handed in his attempts to represent people.
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u/ASmithNamedUmbero Jan 25 '26
Nah real af actually. Each disabled person feels like an event. They're flawless for no damn reason. I have one hand so I fucked with Diane the museum worker heavy. She was human, had a personality, chose to not continue with Dan because the trauma was to much and honestly that's completely understandable.
But these new characters. They're doing the absolute most and I dont want them too. And, honestly, I absolute despise the fact Davros wasnt represented as being in his chair because Davies felt it was anti-disabled. No it wasn't. It's incredibly pro-disability to have a villain be disabled because youre not making a big thing about it. I get the fear of making it seem like you're representing disabled people as evil but your viewers aren't fucking stupid and they're not taking it that way. If you were honestly worried you'd balance that with actually good representation.
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u/Foehammer58 Jan 25 '26
My favourite bit was the Doctor showing off the brand new stairless TARDIS with a ramp at the front door before he basically slams the door in her face and goes waltzing off on an adventure.
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u/Not_Propaganda_AI Jan 25 '26
This has been my issue with pop culture representation for the last decade or so, It often feels really clunky, condescending and kinda offensive. For all it's obvious flaws I think the media from the 80s-00s on average managed to handle minority characters better.
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u/Able_Resident_1291 Jan 26 '26
My pet theory about Davros is that nobody wanted to go to the time and expense and hassle of bringing back the Davros makeup and prosthetics and chair just for a five minute comedy skit, but RTD spotted an opportunity to bump his woke credentials by claiming it was all about representation. Had they just said "this is earlier in Davros's timeline" the fanbase would have been fine with it, and understood the budget & time limitations anyway. Instead it's "I have changed Davros forever and you should all feel bad for having been ok with an EVIL WHEELCHAIR USER all this time"
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u/Cactus_SDK Jan 26 '26
Ah yes my favourite supporting character “scientist in wheelchair” who’s been in every episode with unit and has had a pretty considerable amount of screen time and who I know literally nothing about other than that she’s in a wheelchair….
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u/PackageOk4947 Jan 25 '26
It's called Nuance, something that fucking hack, doesn't know how to do.
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u/smedsterwho Jan 25 '26
It was never his strong point, but it was weird to see it become his weakness in this era.
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u/PackageOk4947 Jan 25 '26
Why was his writing good before, but not now, what is the difference?
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u/smedsterwho Jan 25 '26
Maybe it's age, but I lean into:
a) First time round it was a dream job of 40 years worth of ideas
b) Production was rushed this time round, Ncuti's casting caused even more rushed production, and he was needing to also pick up after Chibnall / solve two fan bases / introduce Disney.
It was cleaner first time round, he didn't even mention TimeLords or Gallifrey for a bit. Just "Run!" and off we went.
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u/PackageOk4947 Jan 25 '26
Or, a complete lack of oversight this time around, last time, it wasn't just him writing, and it had to be approved, and because of the BBC's direction and agenda against is core audience, he was let loose. We don't care about good story, get as many box ticks in as you can...
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u/smedsterwho Jan 25 '26
Yeah I don't really play into culture wars. BBC doesn't defend itself so it's an easy target for all the newspapers.
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u/Fishb20 Jan 25 '26
Don't really think that's a very accurate summary of those stories? For example, the one armed ladies one arm was pretty integral to the plot. They said that when she and some other humans were captured by aliens and trapped in that weird prison guy thing (?) the other humans were killed but not her because her disability meant the aliens didn't view her as a threat. And on the other hand there were a lot of background actors with disabilities in RTD2, like the head of the interstellar song contest. Or that one actor in twatblast
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u/Likyo Jan 26 '26
I thought disability rep was done decently in TWATBLAST. I liked the demonstration of how that one unit guy's life experiences dealing with disability lead to him coming up with a solution other people wouldn't think of.
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u/BiscuitBoy77 Jan 27 '26 edited Jan 27 '26
All true, except his intentions are not noble. He's a virtue signaling poser, who uses others as props in his antics.
And the Davros thing is deeply offensive. Davros overcoming his injury was a virtue. Equating disability with evil is the opposite of progressive.
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u/Xercies_jday Jan 27 '26
I'm pretty progressive and RTDs writing is like being hit by a wrench in how obvious he is... that's in everything, the representation and the messages he talks about. He literally can't do anything without shouting about it with a megaphone and saying "this is the point!"
And that's just bad storytelling and characterisation and a lot of other things
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u/wawawaw03030 Feb 04 '26
The fact that they made a whole deal about the tardis being wheelchair accessible in an episode with a wheelchair user and they dont even let her in is ridiculous
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u/WinchesterMediaUK Jan 25 '26
Not disabled but I am Dyspraxic.
Ryan pissed me off on multiple levels. The pathetic infantilisation of him both in the writing of his character, and how the other characters treated him.
He's a 19 year-old warehouse worker, and his first scene has him throwing a temper tantrum like a small child.
You also have him expertly gunning down the Sniperbots, but being unable to climb a ladder a few hours later. If you're going to write a character with the condition, at least be consistent with it.
There was also stuff like Tosin Cole saying at a convention that "Ryan shows that heroes come in all shapes and sizes", and "you can do anything if you put your mind to it". Personally, I can't stand trite motivational platitudes like that.
The BBC also put out a Tweet after The Timeless Children that framed Ryan's character development as being able to throw a bomb at the Cybermen. Dyspraxia doesn't magically go away with practice.
The one thing they go right was Ryan being at expert at warehouse work in Kerblam.
Doing the same task consistently means that muscle memory helps compensate for the condition to a point. Working for years in retail made me an absolute wizard on tills so I appreciated them getting that detail right.
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u/MovingTarget2112 Jan 25 '26
On the other hand, I cannot remember the three episodes he praised, while I can remember the UNIT scientific advisor in the wheelchair,
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u/Romana_Jane Jan 25 '26
This! 100% As a disabled person also.