Women-only TARDIS: Imagining the Adventures of Clara and Ashildr

By Danny Nicol

University of Westminster

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 America from whence she cannot return.  Only Martha Jones controls her own destiny.  Weary of the Time Lord not requiting her love, she dumps the Doctor, cheers up, and takes advantage of her extraterrestrial experiences to build herself a career within UNIT.  Even Martha’s exit is undercut by the one-sidedness of her love for the Doctor, yet at least she leaves on her own terms and visibly recovers.  Martha apart, gloomy exits have been the order of the day. 

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.