Doctor Who has an internal tension between the Doctor as someone who saves the day, sets things right and doesn’t allow evil to stand, and the fact that in doing so over the course of the show she has killed countless people. Some of the show’s best moments have had the Doctor grapple with this and try to understand and hold on to what it means to do good in the context of great violence. When written by Chris Chibnall she doesn’t even seem to know what violence is.

In The Hungry Earth a small village is under attack. Bodies have been stolen from graves and people are being swallowed by the ground itself. A forcefield has been put around the village, making any escape impossible, and the people that did it are on the way up to the surface. The Doctor rallies everyone into the church to, in his words, “set up a line of defence.”

A woman, Ambrose, has had her husband taken and is worried for the life of her son. She grabs what weapons she can: a double-barrelled shotgun (though no sign of shells for it), a taser, a cricket bat and a bunch of garden tools.

The Doctor tells her no, using weapons “is not the way I do things.” He stands over her, almost head and shoulders taller than her, and tells her to put them away, insisting he’s “asking nicely.” What exactly he might do if she refuses, if he has to do more than ask nicely, is left to her imagination.

Within five minutes Ambrose’s son has been taken and her dad has been fatally poisoned. The Doctor soon manages to take one of the assailants hostage by using a CO2 fire extinguisher to stun her (she’s a cold-blooded reptile person, naturally).

The Doctor abhors weapons. They aren’t how he he does things. He doesn’t do violence. He stuns a cold-blooded creature by lowering her body temperature and taking her hostage (his words). That’s not violence, it’s clever.

The Doctor abhors weapons. They aren’t how he does things. He doesn’t do violence. He stands over you and makes sure you know this isn’t how he does things. He asks nicely that you put away the weapons you’ve gathered to defend your son. He doesn’t say what he’ll do if you try to go against his wishes.

The Doctor’s hypocritical faux-pacifism isn’t confined to Chibnall’s writing but christ he writes her as obnoxiously self-righteous about it when he takes over the show.

In The Woman Who Fell to Earth a crane operator named Karl is being hunted for sport. The Doctor confronts the hunter on top of a crane, declaring she’s “sorting out fair play throughout the universe”. She has taken the teleporter the hunter needs to get home and offers it back to him in exchange for allowing Karl to live.

The hunter refuses and demands the teleporter back or he will detonate bombs he had implanted in the Doctor’s friends that will kill them by unraveling their DNA. He activates the bombs but discovers that the Doctor had secretly managed to transfer the bombs into the hunter himself. He doubles over in pain as blood stars pouring from his face.

While the hunter is disabled Karl kicks him off the crane. The Doctor turns to Karl in disgust and says “You had no right to do that.”

In The Ghost Monument the Doctor and friends are surrounded by sniper robots. Ryan picks up a gun to defend himself. The Doctor tells him to put to put the gun down. She insists she will out-think them. She creates an electro-magnetic pulse to “fry their systems” instead.

There’s little difference in the results of the Doctor’s actions versus what she’s condemning, but it makes sense when you consider it not as condemnation of the results of violence, but of the aesthetics of violence. To Chris Chinball violence is a brutish, blunt and distasteful thing. If it’s not brutish or blunt then it’s not violence and it’s not distasteful. For him violence is not defined by doing harm or causing suffering, it’s defined on purely aesthetic principals.

A gun is violent: It’s stupid and blunt. An electro-magnetic pulse isn’t violent; it has a fancy name and pretty visual effect and doing it means you’re smart. Lowering someone’s body temperature to the point it disables them isn’t violence; it’s clever use of a fire extinguisher. Tricking someone into unraveling their own DNA isn’t violent, but kicking them off a height is.

There’s no depth here and no scope for understanding or tackling systematic violence. This is a perspective that sees systems of oppression and then blames people who fight back against it for resorting to violence. It’s the perspective of the comfortable and privileged. The soft tut tutting at people who don’t stay in their place and stick to “fair play”.

The absurd hypocrisy is laid bare in The Tsuranga Conundrum where the Doctor meets a famous general and immediately starts fangirling over her military history, declaring that she’s recorded in “The Book of Celebrants”. The Doctor, as written by Chibnall, berates those who pick up guns but adores the people who send them to die. Those are the people who get written into books and that makes them important.

It’s not violence; it’s clever.