This election cycle has taken some very, very weird turns, but the latest bit of nonsense is this story coming out my beloved Doctor Who fandom. Among other things revealed in the WikiLeaks dump of Hillary Clinton’s emails, she apparently is not a fan of The Doctor. The email reads…
August 17, 2015 3:50 P.M. “John Podesta” [dabestapodesta@hotmail.com] wrote:
Need to have discussion about Hillary saying Doctor Who is boring garbage that feels like everyone is in on a joke nobody told her about.
She knows that people say that the Steven Moffat episodes are supposed to be good but when someone shows them to her, she just stares at them and asks if England is out of money and that is why they can’t make Doctor Who not look like a web series created by a high school student.
She says Sherlock is alright, but it’s pretty satisfied with itself and feels more like she’s supposed to like it than really actually like it which has killed half of television for her tbh.
Whovians can relax though. The email is completely non-existent. I’ve checked the WikiLeaks archives, and there is no email that discusses Doctor Who, Sherlock or showrunner Steven Moffat. Also, John Podesta’s email address is jpodesta@gmail.com, not dabestapodesta@hotmail.com.
The hoax originated on Twitter from comedian Mike Drucker, who openly admitted it was a joke in responses. It spread to the gullible from there and has since been picked up as straight news by a few fan sites.
As far as I can tell Clinton has never publicly expressed any views regarding Doctor Who, and Googling “Hillary Clinton” “Doctor Who” mostly brings up crazy conservative conspiracy sites talking about how Clinton is apparently a serial killer who murders her physicians. When asked about television shows on Chair Chat, she listed Madame Secretary, The Good Wife and Downton Abbey as her favorites. Oh, and she apparently shares my affection for home and garden shows. Regardless, if Clinton feels like definitively making a statement on Doctor Who, she or a member of her campaign can drop me a tweet and we’ll update this story (response must include favorite Doctor, if applicable).
As a final interesting side note, Hillary Clinton almost certainly already exists as a character in Doctor Who. Barack Obama became the first sitting president to appear on the program, being played by an uncredited stand-in and with the use of archival footage in Season 4’s “The End of Time.” Presumably, Clinton would still be his Secretary of State in the Whoniverse, though she does not physically appear in the scenes with Obama.
This article appears in Oct 27 – Nov 2, 2016.
