I could tell by the cut of the coat. The team behind the reveal of Doctor Who’s latest regeneration tried to maintain the suspense a little longer – it was a dark, masculine grey, with broad shoulders and a black hoodie underneath – but when it comes to dressing women costume designers can’t seem to resist the fitted look: a tucked waistline here, a flattering hem there. They did it in Sherlock, when even the hero’s iconic coat was deemed to need alterations before it was worn by the cutthroat Irene Adler. People make jokes about women’s (societally enforced) knowledge of clothes, but in this case, it was a tip-off. As I’d already been hoping for a refreshing change to the gender dynamics of Doctor Who, the question quickly became not “Will the new Doctor be a woman?” but “Which woman? What will she be like? What adventures will she take us on?”

One would hope that this casting was inevitable – far too slow, but inevitable. There was a palpable feeling that the next Doctor would be female, and it was more than just fandom optimism this time. Series 10 (or series 36, depending how you’re counting) was full of hints. There were conversations on gender between the Twelfth Doctor (Peter Capaldi) and companion Bill (Pearl Mackie). The finale was full of one-liners: “Is the future going to be all girl?” “We can only hope.” There was a male-female face-off for the Doctor’s arch-nemesis and fellow Time Lord, The Master, played by John Simm, last seen in the David Tennant era, and a capricious Michelle Gomez, in the third year of her BAFTA-nominated turn as Missy (their relationship was a playful mix of villainy and weird magnetism, the joke being less about the moral quandary of inter-regeneration attraction and more about the fact that of course the only person The Master is attracted to is himself. Herself? Themselves?). Last series, another Time Lord known as The General regenerated from an elderly white man to a younger black woman with a wry, “Back to normal, am I? The only time I’ve been a man, that last body. Dear lord, how do you cope with all that ego?”

But women are so used to being let down by big-budget film and television that it didn’t feel like a sure thing. This is a field which constantly undervalues female fans, explicitly and implicitly telling women that they do not count, or that they’re unimportant. It would have been a blunder for the BBC to ‘play it safe’ and cast another male actor, but it wouldn’t necessarily have been surprising. Doctor Who has had more than fifty years to institutionalise itself as a pop cultural icon notoriously bound up in its own history. Ironically for a series about a millennia-old alien with the ability to ritually reinvent himself when mortally wounded (“Death is Time Lord for man-flu”), Who’s self-referential canon means it could easily become set in its ways.

There have been some terrific female characters in the show. Among the more recognisable are Catherine Tate’s mouthy Donna and Karen Gillan’s resourceful Amy Pond, while in classic Who, one companion, Ace, famously beat up a Dalek with a baseball bat. But the central, public face of Doctor Who has always stubbornly been that of a dude. (Incidentally, one of Ace’s first lines of dialogue is “you male chauvinist bilge bag”, which is what I might’ve been calling this show if they hadn’t at long last decided to open up the role to fifty percent of the population.) Modern Who got its first female writer in seven years when spin-off Torchwood veteran Catherine Tregenna was hired in 2014. Its only female-directed episode was followed by a four-year drought before Rachel Talalay, now a staple of the directorial roll, landed her first episode. This is despite the fact that women play key roles in production and behind the scenes, including 1960s producer Verity Lambert, who helped get the whole concept off the ground. And even with this casting, the next eleven Doctors (or twelve, if we count the late John Hurt’s unnumbered War Doctor) would have to be female to put gender on an even footing here. There’s this idea that white, straight male stories are universal ones, but it’s just not true: it teaches boys they can be anything and greases the wheels for them to get there, while leaving girls with social and cultural restrictions marked by the absence, rather than the presence, of heroines to look up to. Active, positive changes in how films and television are made – including this one – give young girls evidence of cool women doing awesome things that maybe they could do, too.

Thus, one of the most common responses to this casting of the role has been, “It’s about time.” Jodie Whittaker, or Thirteen as she’ll be in fan parlance, is best known for ITV’s Broadchurch, a series not-so-coincidentally written by incoming Doctor Who showrunner Chris Chibnall, who has previously written for Who and Torchwood. Whittaker has shown off her science fiction chops before, too, most notably in cult indie film Attack the Block. Experienced enough to take on the mantle of being a landmark first female lead, but just unexpected enough to feel like a fresh slate for an old premise, it seems an inspired choice. I’m intrigued to see what she does with the part.

The casting of a female Doctor is a step in the right direction for an institution that is, at its best, madcap and brilliant and oddly moving. It has been some time since it reached these heights; this year’s batch of plots were serviceable but retrospectively forgettable. Few will go down in the history of Who, even with Peter Capaldi giving the script everything he’s got. It was buoyed by the introduction of energetic, down-to-earth Bill, a companion with a life outside the Doctor, complete with serving chips, dating, moving house, and a pre-primetime Saturday evening kiss with another girl. Recent finales have given us not one but two pairs of galaxy-hardened ladies whizzing off to explore time and space together, so perhaps they’re preparing audiences – in the same way they’ve been dropping those hints about gender, womanhood and Time Lord biology – for the sight of two women steering (or being steered by) the TARDIS into new and exciting escapades.

There’s so much potential in this reinvigorated take on everyone’s favourite time traveller. All that remains is for Doctor Who to do its first female lead justice. I’d rather the new series embraced the Doctor’s gender rather than ignore it or try to parallel it to that of previous male incarnations, instead treating her as a fully-realised, complex female being (albeit an alien one). Capaldi’s final episode is yet to come, and the immediate post-regeneration moments are always a bit of fun (“Legs! I’ve still got legs! Good!”, “Kidneys! I’ve got new kidneys!”). No doubt there’ll be a boob comment there somewhere (it won’t be vagina; this is family viewing). As long as the stories are engaging, the characterisation complicated, the writing both funny and poignant – and Who has shown it can do all three and more – this regeneration could be a new lease of life for a worn-around-the-edges creation.