Was Doctor Who too political?

 By Danny Nicol,

University of Westminster

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.