I have been a fan of Doctor Who since, Tom Baker, the 4th Doctor. Baker’s Doctor was quirky and eccentric and didn’t suffer fools for long. 
Frankly, his portrayal from 1974 to 1981 set the template for future Doctors for me. When I started watching the show, I wasn’t initially aware of who the Doctor was or more specifically what the Doctor was. So, when Tom Baker left the show by “regenerating” (changing) into the 5th Doctor, Peter Davison; I pretty much walked away from the series after a couple of episodes. It was almost 25 years later, when the series re-launched with Christopher Eccleston as the 9th Doctor, that I finally understood. Doctor Who is a long-lived, face-changing alien with two hearts and has a machine capable of transporting its occupants through space and time. That’s it. That who and what Doctor Who is.
I emphasize the face-changing alien part because recently some fans seem to have forgotten that. From 1963 to 2016, the Doctor had always been a white male. In 2017, the producers seem to 
remember that the Doctor’s species, in canon, was a gender changer as well as a face-changer. That year, they cast Jodie Whittaker as the first female Doctor. Fandom was less than thrilled with Whittaker as the 13th Doctor. Later, when producers chose Ncuti Gatwa, a Black man, to be the 15th Doctor, a small but vocal minority of fans lost their minds.
That small vocal minority framed everything on Doctor Who since 2017 as being “woke” and D.E.I. (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion); things in their minds that were bad. Suddenly, according to these people, the scripts were poorly written and the acting was “sub-par.” According to them, no one was watching the show and its ratings were tanking and it should go away. It wasn’t true, but this small group of small-minded individuals were trying to wish this show out of existence because its main character was no longer a white male. That sounds terrible, but that was the bottom line rationale.
So, in the episode, The Reality War, the 15th Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) needs to release his regeneration energy into the time votex to set time and the universe back to its correct reality. Doing so, will in fact kill him causing him to regenerate (change) into another person, presumably the 16th Doctor. As he is preparing to do this, he is visited by the 13th Doctor (Jodie Whittaker) who says she was thrown out of her timeline by the situation the 15th Doctor is attempting to fix. (With me so far?)
At that moment, the two Doctors hated the most by a vocal minority of fans are on screen at the same time. It is a joyful moment in which the 13th Doctor, while talking to the 15th Doctor, is actually talking to the viewers. The 13th Doctor (Jodie Whittaker) tells 
the 15th Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa and us), “We never change. All these faces and we never really change.” And in that statement, she defined the 60 year old franchise and what it is really about. It is a reminder that no matter what the Doctor looks like, he is still just a long-lived, face-changing alien who calls Earth home. And in, perhaps in one the greatest last acts of defiance to the naysayers, the 15th Doctor regenerates into a blonde woman resembling one of the previous companions of the 9th and 10th Doctor.
Did I think Ncuti Gatwa was a great Doctor? No. However, I thought he was a good one and with more time; he could have been a great one. Look, Peter Capaldi (12th Doctor) was a terrible, mean-spirited Doctor in his first year. But, by his third year, he displayed the compassion and dry humor most associated with the Doctor Who franchise.
We’ll never know what Ncuti Gatwa could have been, but we do have two seasons of who he was. He was a good Doctor Who and I will miss him.
