In a famous article in 2004 Alan
McKee asked whether classic era Doctor
Who (1963-89) had been political.
He argued that one should analyse fans’ views of whether they saw the programme
as political. He discovered that they
did not see it as such, at least not in the sense of state-level politics (“Is Doctor Who Political", European Journal of Cutural Studies
vii/2 (2004: 201-217). By contrast in
2018 there were complaints of Doctor Who being
too political, indeed “too preachy”.
This post argues that this may
have been the case, but only in the sense that episodes with a highly political
content were rather unwisely bunched together instead of being more adroitly “diluted”
by “less political” stories. Furthermore
it could also be contended in the programme’s defence that the issues which
featured in these highly-political episodes were, for the most part, very familiar
to those who follow the show.
The opening episode, “The Woman
Who Fell to Earth” (2018), tackles the Doctor’s regeneration into the first
woman Doctor (Jodie Whittaker), as well as introducing the new companions – Yaz
Khan (Mandip Gill), Ryan Sinclair (Tosin Cole) and Graham O’Brien (Bradley
Walsh). Whilst the Doctor’s gender change was something new, the possibility had
already been flagged up by the earlier transformation of arch-enemy the Master
into Missy. Nor is diversity of
companions anything new: although Yaz is the Doctor’s first Asian companion, Ryan
is the Doctor’s fourth black one; and the experiment of an older companion in
Graham had already been made with Wilf Mott’s (Bernard Cribben’s) one-off role
as companion in “The End of Time” (2010).
In their first adventure in outer
space, “The Ghost Monument” (2018), the Doctor and her companions become
embroiled in a cut-throat competition between two humanoids each determined to
win a race. The episode becomes an
allegory against over-competitiveness, the lesson being that individuals are
stronger when they work together. This message is nothing new. Indeed it was the theme of the very last
serial of classic-era Doctor Who,
“Survival” (1989), which enlisted British comedians Gareth Hale and Norman Pace
as shopkeepers to underscore the story’s normative stance that too much
competition is a ruinous thing.
The team then journey to 1950s Alabama for “Rosa ”
(2018), in which an alien time meddler tries to disrupt history so that the
famous Rosa Parks bus incident does not occur.
Anti-racism is a well-worn theme of Doctor
Who and the story is somewhat reminiscent of “Remembrance of the Daleks”
(1988) where the Doctor has to fight a group of British racists who are
none-too-subtly in league with the Daleks.
The similarity of “Arachnids in the UK ” (2018) to the classic-era story
“The Green Death” (1973) was widely noted.
Both have the theme of corporate irresponsibility towards the
environment - and human life.
“Kerblam!” (2018) envisages an
Amazon in outer space. It continues Doctor Who’s well-worn anti-corporate
theme, since Kerblam! is evidently not a nice place to work. Yet the tale also seems to criticise
“extremist” methods of achieving egalitarian ends. This again is nothing new: the same message
was apparent in “The Monster of Peladon” in 1974. “Demons of the Punjab ”
(2018), set at the time of the India-Parkistan partition, condemns religious
intolerance yet also dwells on the limits of time-travellers’ legitimate
interference in the course of history. Both
these themes are central in “The Massacre of Saint Bartholomew’s Eve” (1966)
which concerns conflict between Catholics and Protestants.
Towards the latter half of the
series there were several episodes with less overtly-articulated political
themes. “The Tsuranga Conundrum” (2018)
involves gender-swapping, with the Doctor and Yaz being the all-action heroes
whilst Graham and Ryan serve as birthing partners for a pregnant man. “The Witchfinder” (2018) also takes up the
theme of gender discrimination but the message is softened by being comfortably
removed to the seventeenth century. “It
Takes You Away” (2018) is a morality tale about mortality and grief with
perhaps the least overt political content of the series. The series finale, “The Battle of Ranskoor Av
Kolos” (2018), concerns faith and doubt – arguably more religious than
political. The New Year special,
“Resolution” (2019), takes up a pervasive theme of the series: that family is
not about DNA or sharing a surname but is about how one treats those one holds
dear. Indeed by the end of the adventure
the Doctor refers to her companions as “extended fam”.
The episodes with the most overt
political content, therefore, ended up being substantially bunched
together. Herein lay the production
team’s only real mistake. Jane
Esperson, a writer for Battlestar
Galactica, has commented that the thicker the metaphor and the more
distractions there are for the viewer, the more the writer of a science fiction
programme can “get away with” by way of political messages. Crucially, therefore, writing political
science fiction involves an element of skill, in order to “get away with
it”. To be sure, “political” Doctor Who is something to celebrate: it
allows the programme’s writers to create dystopias and flag up what is worrisome
within our country. It enables them to
draw attention to the gap between the nation as it is and the nation as it
ought to be. It permits them to
circumvent - at least to an extent - the BBC’s political conservatism. But political messages need to be spread elegantly
like caviar not smothered on like marmalade.
A degree of subtlety is required so that viewers enjoy the politics of Doctor Who rather than feel that the
show is ramming its politics down their throats.
