Crossing the Time Vortex: Retrospective on Doctor Who (new series; 2005-2010)

Doctor Who has proven to be a very long-lived television series – it is in fact the longest science-fiction television series in history, according to the Guinness Book of Records. Apart from its ‘cult’ status among fans, Doctor Who has been kept alive all these years through a plot device which allows the eponymous hero to ‘regenerate’ when he’s mortally wounded. Whether it is considered “shameless retrofitting” or “a stroke of genius,” regeneration has undoubtedly contributed to the programme’s longevity,¹ as it enables the BBC periodically to recast the lead actor and rejuvenate the series for a new generation of fans. The BBC’s success in regenerating Doctor Who as a popular series and commercial franchise after a sixteen year hiatus is evident in the widespread media and fan interest in the show’s plot twists, cast changes and viewing figures since the new series began airing in 2005. The most recent event of significance in the series – the regeneration of the Tenth Doctor (David Tennant) into his Eleventh incarnation (Matt Smith) – was watched by 12.3 million British viewers on New Year’s Day 2010.² After the conclusion of another chapter in the show’s history, it seems to be an apt moment to reflect on what the new series Doctor Who has achieved since its 2005 rebirth.

As a television series that traces the adventures of a time-travelling humanoid alien, Doctor Who has thrived on stories about the crossing of borders, regions, and worlds since the BBC began broadcasting it in 1963. As one scholar has suggested: “What makes Doctor Who particularly notable, and has perhaps enabled it to last so long, is its blurring of boundaries … [B]y transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary, the earthly into something unearthly – be that a telephone box, a sink plunger, a shop dummy or a nearby quarry,” the show challenges us not to take the visible world for granted and to learn to see it again as something filled with boundless potentiality.³ This, you might say, is characteristic of science fiction generally, but Doctor Who also blurs generic boundaries by shifting between science fiction, horror, mystery, costume drama, comedy, pantomime, fantasy, and action adventure.

The new series continues the tradition of the old by presenting numerous episodes which defy exclusive sci-fi classification. In Season 2, “The Girl in the Fireplace” has the Doctor entering the world of eighteenth-century France through time ‘windows’ located on a spaceship that exists 3000 years in the future. The action continually crosses between the dark futuristic tunnels of the spaceship and the bright, historic setting of Louis XVth’s palace, creating an almost surreal sense of displacement. The episode is sci-fi and period drama rolled into one. In Season 4, the Doctor goes on a tour of the planet “Midnight,” and what begins as a comedy quickly descends into a psychological thriller in which the Time Lord is rendered powerless by an invisible alien force that steals his voice and consciousness. The premise of “Midnight” is the banal and annoying experience of having our words repeated back to us in childish copy-book fashion. The alien first repeats the Doctor’s words, synchronises (i.e. speaks at the same time as the Doctor), then takes over completely by speaking words which the Doctor has no choice but to repeat. An ordinary and childish game of ‘copy-cat’ is thus converted to a terrifying means of psychological control. The episode is a good example of how the blurring of the ordinary and the extraordinary provides narrative drive to a show that excels in telling good stories with a limited budget (invisible aliens by their very nature do not need to be filmed!).

The crossing of genres and the divide between earthly and unearthly reality were characteristic of the old Doctor Who serials. The new series Doctor Who, however, seems more obsessed than the old with the borders between life and death. The Doctor’s amazing power to regenerate gives him the quasi-divine qualities of a character that is virtually immortal.⁴ But for those without regenerative powers, cybernetic technology or genetic manipulation may be the only means of prolonging life. In addition to the Daleks and the Cybermen, the most persistent villains who refuse to die, the new series has introduced a new array of monsters, aliens and crazed scientists in pursuit of the ultimate Holy Grail – immortality.

Cheating death is in many respects what the new Who is all about. Its moral implications provide the subtext of many episodes, particularly from Season 2 onwards. The humanistic quest for immortality connects Doctor Who to what is arguably the first science-fiction story ever written, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus (1818). Shelley’s novel has spawned innumerable interpretations in its relatively short life, from “a late version of the Faust myth, or an early version of the modern myth of the mad scientist; the id on the rampage, the proletariat running amok or what happens when a man tries to have a baby without a woman.” But by far the most popular interpretation, as Marilyn Butler has pointed out, is this:

Readers, filmgoers, people who are neither, take the very word Frankenstein to convey an awful warning: don’t usurp God’s prerogative in the Creation-game, or don’t get too clever with technology.⁵

Victor Frankenstein puts together pieces of the dead (“bones from charnel houses,” and the “materials” of “the dissecting room and the slaughter-house”) to create a living creature, without God, woman, Nature, or evolutionary intervention.⁶ His experiment, which succeeds in reviving dead flesh, is not only a usurpation of prerogative, but also a doomed mission to change the very nature of humanity, a Promethean attempt to make humans transcend mortality.

Doctor Who has often been criticised for breeding an ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ mentality, in which aliens are pitted against humans in a not very subtle allegory of political divisions in the contemporary world, but one way in which the show unites humans, androids, cyborgs and aliens is its portrayal of their collective goal to survive at all cost. Like the Doctor, who is introduced in the new series for the first time as the ‘last of the Time Lords’, many of his enemies are also the last of their kind.⁷ These include Cassandra, “the last human,” who survives only as a piece of skin stretched across a metal frame in “The End of the World” (Season 1, Episode 2), and the Gelth in “The Unquiet Dead” (Season 1, Episode 3), blue gaseous creatures who trick the Doctor into allowing them to possess the corpses of dead humans as a temporary means of regaining the corporeality they lost during the destructive Time War (a battle fought primarily between the Doctor’s own people, the Time Lords, and the Daleks). The Daleks, or rather one lonely Dalek, first reappear in Season 1, Episode 6. Demonised in the old series, the Dalek in the new series is an oppressed creature, imprisoned by an American businessman and connoisseur of alien artefacts. The episode goes on to develop the analogy between the Doctor (last of the Time Lords) and the Dalek (the last of the Daleks) in what is the most sympathetic ‘Dalek story’ in the history of the series.

The ‘immortality’ theme becomes even more insistent from Season 2 onwards. It is particularly prominent in the Cybermen story-arc, consisting of two episodes, “Rise of the Cybermen” and “The Age of Steel.” John Lumic, the head of Cybus Industries, who creates (or rather, re-creates) the Cybermen, is a modern Frankenstein, whose desire to live forever translates into a goal to convert all mankind into cyborgs, with a “skin of metal and a body that will never age or die.” As Pete Tyler, one of the Doctor’s temporary companions, says, Lumic’s project “all started as a way of prolonging life, keeping the brain alive at any cost.” The story-arc develops into an interrogation of what it is to be human – is a person still recognisably ‘human’ if his brain is alive, but the body and the heart are stripped away? According to the Doctor, it isn’t possible, as Cybermen have “all their humanity taken away. It’s a living brain jammed inside a cybernetic body with a heart of steel, all emotions removed.”

The moral of the Cybermen story – that humans must accept their mortality, and that life without pain or feeling is no life at all – echoes the moral of an earlier episode, “School Reunion,” in which the Doctor is tempted by the leader of the Krillitane to join him in creating a brave new world, ruled by Krillitane and guided by his wisdom as a Time Lord. “Become a god … at my side,” says the Krillitane. “Imagine what you could do. Think of the civilisations you could save. Perganon … Ascinta … Your own people, Doctor, standing tall. The Time Lords … reborn!” Seeing that the Doctor is weakening under the temptation of bringing the Time Lords back to life, his companion Sarah Jane Smith firmly argues against the Krillitane proposition:

“No! The universe has to move forward. Pain and loss – they define us as much as happiness or love. Whether it’s a world or a relationship, everything has its time, and everything ends.”

Sarah Jane understands more than most the cost of premature loss. As a former companion of the Fourth Doctor (Tom Baker), she had been unceremoniously ‘dumped’ by him without so much as a proper farewell, and here, she suggests not only that she has come to terms with the abrupt end of her relationship with the Doctor, but also that life is governed by a paradox of universal survival and individual death. For the universe to continue “mov[ing] forward,” each individual and race must accept the fact that “everything has its time, and everything ends.”

Perhaps the most ‘Frankensteinian’ story in the new Who is “The Lazarus Experiment” in Season 3, Episode 6. An eighty-year-old science professor, Richard Lazarus, promises the world that he has a device which will “change what it means to be human.” He steps into a machine, which uses sonic technology to reverse the aging process, and walks out again, looking as young as a man in his late 30s or early 40s. But the experiment backfires – the machine which transformed him, and which Lazarus believes will give his future clients the ability to live “perhaps indefinitely,” causes a regression of his DNA, and turns him into a giant, murderous insectoid creature. During a brief respite in which he reassumes human form, Lazarus and the Doctor exchange their contrasting views of humanity:

Doctor: Facing death is part of being human. You can’t change that!

Lazarus: No, Doctor. Avoiding death – that’s being human. It’s our strongest impulse to cling to life with every fibre of being. I’m only doing what everyone before me has tried to do. I’ve simply been more … successful … I’m more now than I was. More than just an ordinary human.

Doctor: There’s no such thing as an ordinary human.

Lazarus: You’re so sentimental, Doctor. Maybe you are older than you look.

Doctor: I’m old enough to know that a longer life isn’t always a better one. In the end, you just get tired. Tired of the struggle. Tired of losing everyone that matters to you. Tired of watching everything turn to dust. If you live long enough, Lazarus, the only certainty left is that you’ll end up alone.

This well-scripted scene – set in Southwark Cathedral, which provides a sense of religious aura – reveals that the new Who is not only an ‘action adventure’ series, but also a series that continually provokes questions of what it means to be ‘human’. In the scene, the Doctor circles the prostrate figure of Lazarus, who fights painfully against the genetic mutation, which will again change him from human ‘Jekyll’ to insectoid ‘Hyde’. Although he holds the moral high ground, there is poignancy in Lazarus’s concept of human instinct as that of avoiding death, rather than simply being resigned to mortal existence. But like his Biblical namesake, Lazarus’s rebirth is short-lived – he changes back into a monster, and is defeated by the Doctor, as all Who monsters are in the end, reverting to his eighty-year-old form at his death. His fate bears out the truth of the Doctor’s reflection upon the pitiful end of man – “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper” – a line taken from the final stanza of T. S. Eliot’s 1925 poem, “The Hollow Men.”

The Doctor, who often appears to be a time-traveller with a ‘Messiah complex’ (he’s always saving the world from apocalyptic destruction), appears in “The Lazarus Experiment” also as a Methuselah figure, “tired” of his longevity and counselling the Promethean scientist not to desire a life which provides only the “certainty” that “you’ll end up alone.”⁸ The new series places emphasis on the loneliness of the Time Lord, which reshapes his immortality as a curse, not a blessing. The only character to share his scepticism is Captain Jack Harkness (John Barrowman), who also seems frustrated by his inability to die.⁹ Apart from the Doctor and Jack, however, the universe of Who is filled with creatures seeking (as the medieval alchemists did) the elusive ‘elixir of life’. From the Clockwork Droids in “The Girl in the Fireplace” (Season 2) to the Family of Blood and the Weeping Angels, who try to live off the ‘energies’ of humans and Time Lords in Season 3, Doctor Who consistently churns out stories about immortality quests, a narrative that reaches back to the original Frankenstein, and perhaps even further to the Arthurian Grail legend, which the series remoulds for a twenty-first century television audience.

‘Immortality quest’ is of course only one type of narrative in a series that draws from an eclectic variety of narratives and genres. Season 4, for example, does not feature explicitly an ‘immortality quest’, but focuses more on the moral dilemmas of a Time Lord. Clearly, many monsters in Who are more ambitious in their aims than simply securing survival: the Daleks and the Master want world domination (and are not too concerned about whether they exterminate every other species in the process); the Sontaran want to use Earth as a breeding ground for more Sontaran soldiers, who will help them win a 50,000-year war against the Rutans (Season 4, Episodes 4 and 5); the Vashta Nerada strip away the flesh of their victims, feeding instinctively, rather than vengefully, on the humans responsible for turning the forests from which they originated into a library (Season 4, Episodes 9 and 10). The world of Who is a ‘dog-eat-dog’ world, which speaks as powerfully to a post-9/11 audience as it probably did to audiences of the old series during the Cold War.

Some critics have already pointed out the post-9/11 resonances of the new Doctor Who, a series which envisions Earth as perpetually threatened by war and invasion, but a planet that is somehow ‘immortal’, as it always survives apocalypse at the end of each episode.¹⁰ Unlike the old Who, the new series tells its stories in episodic, not serialised form, that is, one story is completed in one episode, with the exception of ‘story-arcs’, in which a story extends over two, or at most, three episodes. The overall effect of episodic story-telling is that the Doctor (and the universe) seems to “reset to zero” at the beginning of each episode. Humans may have seen aliens last week, but by next week’s episode, they are just as surprised to see another species try to conquer the world. This phenomenon is characteristic of the historical movement that Nietzsche described in The Gay Science (1882) and Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883) as the ‘eternal return’. The plane hijackings on September 11, 2001, which led to the destruction of the World Trade Centre in New York, became a unique and iconic historical event, but every subsequent terrorist attack since 9/11 has, whether explicitly or implicitly, been considered as a recurrence of an event which will continue recurring, perhaps ad infinitum. The notion that terrorism is a war without end (and that the US-led war against terrorism also seems endless) aligns with the Nietzschean concept inherent in Doctor Who that it’s not a question of if Earth will come under attack from alien aggressors, but when those attacks will recur.

The eternal return of periods of global devastation, however, is not cause for despair. As Alec Charles suggests, these events never end in total apocalypse, but are presented as “blessing[s] in disguise,” testimonies to the survival capacity of the human race, which never fails in Doctor Who to outlive the eternal recurrence of war, terror, or any threat to its existence.¹¹ Like Hollywood ‘disaster’ movies, Doctor Who naturalises all forms of military, political and environmental catastrophe, and celebrates the immortality of the human race, even as it appears morally opposed to individual aspirations to immortality.

As its own longevity suggests, Doctor Who is also a show that seeks to defy the limits of the average lifespan of a television series. From the romanticised perspective of fans, it has resurrected like a phoenix from the ashes, vindicated by its current commercial and critical success from years of mainstream ridicule. However, the new series has now reached a pivotal point in its history, and the question that everyone has been asking since writer-producer Russell T. Davies and actor David Tennant announced their departure in 2008 was whether the phoenix would continue to rise, or whether it would fall victim to the eternal recurrence of decline and fall, the fate which all television series, not only Doctor Who, must eventually confront. It would be an understatement to say that speculation has been rife about whether Season 5, which marks Steven Moffat’s debut as head writer and executive producer, and Matt Smith’s debut as the Eleventh Doctor, would maintain the quality and popularity of the series, which rose to phenomenal heights during the tenure of their respective predecessors.

Season 5 began airing in the UK on 3 April, 2010. The reviews of the season opener, “The Eleventh Hour,” were overwhelmingly positive, and perhaps testified as much to the parochialism of the British press as to the quality of the episode. It is refreshing to see a new face in the TARDIS – Matt Smith plays the Doctor with as much verve and energy as both his predecessors (Eccleston and Tennant), and Karen Gillan is his new sassy kissagram of an assistant – but by Episode 2, the papers began to notice cracks appearing in the quality of the scripts, cracks that seem to be growing as ugly and obvious as the ‘crack-in-the-wall’ theme, which is this season’s (inferior) equivalent to ‘Bad Wolf’, ‘Torchwood’, ‘Vote 1 Saxon’, and ‘Medusa Cascade’, the catchphrases which were used to keep fans guessing about what secrets would be revealed in the finales of Seasons 1-4. “The Eleventh Hour” is fast-paced and exhilarating, delivering a promising start to Season 5, but it all goes downhill from there. Episode 2, “The Beast Below,” fails to impress with its silly premise: adult citizens on the Starship UK have the opportunity every five years to enter a voting booth and watch a video that explains the horrible truth about what keeps the Starship moving. After watching the video, citizens may choose to ‘protest’ or ‘forget’ what they have seen with the press of a button, but since the truth is too horrifying to accept, everyone chooses to press the ‘forget’ button. Not only is this a paltry rip-off from The Matrix’s choice of the red or blue pill, but it is also an uninspired and unsophisticated parody of a totalitarian regime masking its oppressive practices with the trappings of democracy.

The reappearance of the Daleks in Episode 3, “Victory of the Daleks,” brings Season 5 to a genuine low. It is the worst Dalek story produced in the new series so far. Doctor Who stories in the past have rewritten numerous events of British history, and writer Mark Gatiss seems to have thought that it would be quite a gimmick to rewrite the history of the London Blitz by having Winston Churchill try to defeat the Nazis with Daleks (which the war-time PM calls ‘Ironsides’). The plot is predictable from the moment the ‘Ironsides’ appear – the machines at first appear to be controlled by the humans who purport to have ‘invented’ them, but after the Doctor knocks them around a bit, they suddenly rediscover their Dalek identity and turn hostile. The episode goes from bad to worse when the Dalek Ironsides teleport to a spaceship above Earth and use a progenitor device to create a new race of larger Daleks, which have acquired a new coat of paint in (gasp!) five primary colours. When the new Daleks (or ‘iDaleks’, as they’ve been called by the British press) glide into the room, they are introduced in the corniest manner like a new fleet of cars in an Australian Mazda commercial. (One can almost hear the tune of “Zoom, zoom, zoom!” or Apple’s iMac melody in the background).¹² If the only innovation that the BBC can come up with to revitalise the series is that of increasing the size of the Daleks and giving them a paint job, then the series is really in trouble of decline.

It is heartening to note that the new season starts to improve in Episodes 4 and 5 (“The Time Angels” / “Flesh and Stone”), which sees the long-anticipated return of Professor River Song, the feisty heroine in Moffat’s story about flesh-eating shadows in Season 4’s “Silence in the Library” and “Forest of the Dead”, as well as the Weeping Angels, the scary statues in Season 3’s “Blink”. Episode 6 is Doctor Who’s response to the Twilight phenomenon, but instead of vampires or werewolves hiding in human form, “Vampires in Venice” shows a fish-like species of alien hiding in vampiric form. The episode is, like “The Beast Below,” a survival story. Like the starwhale which transports the Starship UK, the Saturnynian aliens in Episode 6 are the last of their kind, who lost their planet and found refuge in Venice. The plan of the Saturnynian’s matriarch (masquerading as Countess Rosanna Calvierri) is to sink the city and turn its canals into a breeding ground for her species, which of course the Doctor denies her. “One city to save an entire species. Was that too much to ask? … Tell me, Doctor. Can your conscience carry the weight of another dead race?” says Rosanna before feeding herself to her doomed children. It is a poignant, if recycled, moment of eternal return: yet another creature has been foiled in her attempt to preserve and prolong the life of her own kind.

Season 5 has reached its midpoint in Episode 7, “Amy’s Choice,” the last episode which I could view before this article’s publication deadline. The name of the new villain (‘Dream Lord’) may sound uninspiring, but the actual plot of which he is the mastermind is the cleverest in the season so far, owing to the fact that it plays dynamically with the Doctor’s (and the audience’s) ability to tell the difference between a dream world and a real world. Writer Simon Nye in his debut script for Doctor Who creates a new twist to the narrative formula of ‘parallel worlds’ by forcing the Doctor and his companions to make a perilous and impossible choice. If they die in the dream world, they will simply wake up in reality, but if they die in reality, their death will be genuine. As the Dream Lord puts it succinctly: “That’s why it’s called reality.” The decision that the Doctor must make is not which world to remain in, but which world to die in. “We have to decide which battle to lose,” he says to Amy and her fiancé Rory. To provide further analysis would spoil a brilliant story, and while casual viewers haven’t missed much in Episodes 1-6, Episode 7 is evidence that Doctor Who may finally be returning to excellent form.

Doctor Who is a series which has clearly demonstrated its resilience and ability to adapt to change in the past. The challenge facing Moffat and the rest of the BBC team is not new – producer John Nathan-Turner, for example, managed a difficult transition from Tom Baker’s Fourth Doctor to Peter Davison’s Fifth Doctor when he took control of the old series in 1980. After four successful seasons, the new Who has established its ‘street cred’ with old fans and created a new generation of ‘Whovians’, many of whom were not fans of the old series. Whereas the regeneration of Eccleston’s Doctor into Tennant’s Doctor at the end of Season 1 was at a juncture in which the programme was still developing its fanbase and increasing its mainstream audience, the juncture of Tennant’s regeneration into Smith is a different story. Although the BBC will endeavour to continue expanding the Doctor Who franchise, the ‘mainstream’ and ‘cult’ fanbase has probably reached critical mass, and the series needs to find a way to keep entertaining an audience which has educated itself in ‘Whovian’ knowledge, and which demands innovation as well as fidelity to the canonical elements of a show that it has grown to love.

When asked about his main goal for the series, Steven Moffat’s response could not have been more forthright: “[My goal is] for it not to be shit … The audience, whether they’re eight years old or 48, they’re not waiting to see why it’s different or strange or new, they’re just wanting it to be really good. It’s actually an incredibly easy challenge to make something different. It’s incredibly hard to make something good.”¹³ Let’s hope that Doctor Who can tread the fine line between doing “something good” and “something different” because ideally, one would think that innovative stories are an essential ingredient to creating high-quality sci-fi drama. To return to the statement of Sarah Jane Smith in Season 2, “Everything has its time, and everything ends.” The BBC’s mistake with the old series was perhaps its failure not to end it sooner rather than later, which resulted in the ignominious, though temporary, departure in 1989 of a television show that had clearly seen better days. The new Doctor Who will have to end someday, and become known as an ‘old series’ in its own right, but one hopes that it survives long enough to depart this time round, not (as T. S. Eliot suggested) with a “whimper,” but with a real “bang.”