By Danny Nicol
In “new-show” Doctor Who, travelling with the Doctor
comes at a high price. For the (male) Doctor,
the adventures in time and space go on and on; for the (mainly female)
companions they usually end in tears. Since
Doctor Who’s return in 2005 the
Doctor’s women have suffered a variety of unfortunate fates: Rose Tyler is
banished to an alternative Universe and builds a career at its Torchwood
institute, yet is repeatedly depicted as morose. She is eventually palmed off with an unstable
Doctor-substitute. Donna Noble is depoliticised
by the Doctor erasing her memories of their adventures in time and space, returning
to her former world of gossip and weddings. Amy Pond, along with husband Rory, is zapped
back in time to an unliberating 1930s
These departures undoubtedly make
the new show “more emotional” than the old show. We need our hankies more. But this emotionality comes at a price. Doctor
Who’s gender politics have never been marvellous: the show’s template was
normally male dominant hero, female subordinate companion. But in the new show the departures of the
companions have been persistently unfavourable to the women characters, while
the man – the Doctor - bounces back. It’s
a rather disturbing pattern.
Doctor Who’s anti-women tendency seemed taken to its logical
conclusion with the killing-off of companion Clara Oswald in “Face the Raven”
(2015). Why bother giving the Doctor’s
women dismal futures when you can kill them.
Thankfully the 2015 series finale “Hell Bent” revised this departure. Plucked out of time and space by the Time
Lords as she is about to be killed, she eventually makes off in a stolen Tardis
with a woman companion, Ashildr (otherwise known as Me, Lady Me and Mayor Me).
This twist in the plot won’t
generate a spin-off, as far as I know.
However, imagining The Adventures
of Clara and Ashildr can provide useful insights into Doctor Who. There might be
several interesting differences between such a spin-off and “traditional” Doctor Who, some of which bear on Doctor Who’s politics.
First, The Adventures of Clara and Ashildr would remove the dead hand of Doctor Who’s gender narrative – dominant
male, subordinate female. Clara and Ashildr are both women, and both have diverse
experience. Breaking the mould would
make for a more interesting tension. In this regard it is intriguing that, whilst Ashildr (an immortal) may have the wisdom of years, it is Clara who pushes the lever which sets their TARDIS off on its travels, and does so with a jolt clearly reminiscent the Doctor abducting his first two companions, Ian and Barbara, in the show's very first episode ("An Unearthly Child" (1963)). For
good measure, Clara has already claimed to be bisexual, boasting of a
relationship with Jane Austen, so there is the possibility of a romantic entanglement
between the women (as there was between two men, Captain Jack and Ianto, in the
spin-off Torchwood). And what if the ladies acquired a male
companion? What if that male companion
were to be “helpless damsel-in-distress type”, forever screaming at monsters? What if he tended to wander off, get into
trouble and have to be rescued by Clara and Ashildr?
It might be telling to turn Doctor Who’s traditions on their head.
Secondly, Clara and Ashildr, whatever
their background, do not enjoy the Doctor’s encyclopaedic knowledge of time, space
and monsters. This is signalled in “Hell
Bent” by Ashildr having to consult the TARDIS manual. A little less knowledge might be a good thing.
Doctor
Who’s early years were marked by a sense of wonderment as the Doctor met
beings, including the Daleks, of whom he was wholly unaware. The show’s original producer Verity Lambert
complained that, as the years went by, the Doctor increasingly possessed “this
awful thing of knowing everything and being right about everything”. (J Tulloch
and M Alvarado, Doctor Who the Unfolding
Text. New York :
St Martins Press, 1983, 130).
Thirdly, what would actually be
the point of Clara’s and Ashildr’s travels? Would
it be one long holiday? In Doctor Who’s earliest days the main
object was to return Ian and Barbara to
their own time and planet. Some say that
it was during “The Dalek Invasion of Earth” (1964) that the Doctor first
articulated his mission to fight evil. But this has led to many adventures
where his choices have been questionable and his actions brutal. The show has had a patchy record in
questioning and interrogating these choices and actions: sometimes stories have
done so; sometimes the Doctor’s virtue is simply taken as read. Perhaps Clara and Ashildr, without the Doctor’s
masculine and aristocratic authority, and with each accountable to the other,
might have more sustained disagreements about the rightness or wrongness of their
deeds in time and space.
