Missy and the Doctor: isn't Doctor Who political?

By Danny Nicol
University of Westminster

First woman Doctor?  Clara Oswald tries to
 convince a Cyberman that she is the Time Lord.

In a celebrated article published in 2004 entitled “Is Doctor Who political?” Professor Alan McKee argued that Doctor Who’s “old show” (1963-89) was not political because fans whom he surveyed did not see it as political – at least, not in the sense of traditional, state-level politics.  ((2004) 7 European Journal of Cultural Studies 201).  McKee’s argument seemed to contain the suggestion that scholars should deprioritise interpreting the politics of Doctor Who themselves, and should instead focus their attentions more on soliciting the opinions of fans on the matter.   

Say something nice

This blog post will resist the temptation of critiquing McKee’s stance.  But it will observe that – a decade on - McKee does not seem to have carried the day.  In the last four years in particular, a significant scholarly literature has emerged interpreting Doctor Who, including political aspects.  Academics have declined to “shut up, shut up, shut uppity up”.

Moreover Doctor Who’s recent series finale “Dark Water”/“Death in Heaven” (2014), suggests that Doctor Who is indeed political.  No fewer than three political themes pervade it.

"Missy.  Short for Mistress.  Well...I couldn't very well
keep calling myself the Master, could I?"

First, feminism.  The series as a whole repeatedly reflected – or perhaps satirised - the growing clamour that the Doctor be played by a woman.  In the series finale, therefore, the mysterious Missy turns out to be the newly regenerated, regendered Master, a long-time opponent of the Doctor; and companion Clara Oswald identifies herself to the Cybermen as the Doctor, with the opening titles being changed to give Jenna Coleman, who plays Clara, the billing usually reserved for the man who plays the Doctor.  For good measure, at the end of the adventure, the Doctor and Clara joke about the Doctor becoming Queen of Gallifrey.  In his article, McKee contends that “gender politics” is different from “traditional state-level politics”, but such a sharp demarcation is pernicious.  It serves to marginalise feminism.  The question of why women – the majority of the population – do not form majorities in Parliaments and Cabinets, is both a matter of gender politics and a matter of state-level politics.  And the Doctor is a political figure – not least in this adventure, where he fleetingly becomes President of Earth.

 

Missy implores the Doctor to accept her gift:
 a Cyberman army

Secondly, the question of whether the Doctor is a “good man”.  It is arguable indeed that the series offered us a de-legalised version of the “Trial of a Time Lord” story arc of 1986, when the Time Lords place the Doctor on trial for his incorrigible meddling with other peoples and planets.  Throughout the series the Doctor has been expressing his misgivings about whether he is a good man.  This theme has been part and parcel of the new show since it began in 2005 and has shadowed Britain's controversial interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan.  The series finale culminates with Missy offering the Doctor “an indestructible army to range across the Universe” so that he can enforce his version of what is “right”.  The Doctor rejects the offer.  Human companions are army enough for him.  But does this make him a good man?  Doesn't the Doctor, like Britain, merely “punch above his weight” in foreign interventions?



Thirdly, the power of corporations.  In “Dark Water”/“Death in Heaven”, a mighty company called 3W is using the bodies of dead people to create Cybermen.  It does so under the guise of giving "more life" to the dead.  The Doctor detects the stench of profiteering: “fakery, all of it; it’s a con, it’s a racket!”  The corporate domination of Britain is certainly an important element of the country’s politics.  The show’s repeated onslaughts on corporate power have already been considered in this blog; the series finale continues the tradition in feisty fashion.

Clara Oswald, constitutional scholar?

By David Yuratich,
Bournemouth University

 

"Kill The Moon" (2014) continues the tradition of parcelling difficult moral decisions into the Doctor’s adventures. Fully in keeping with the Twelfth Doctor’s escapades thus far, the resolution of its central dilemma is left to Clara. When it becomes apparent that the moon is not a benign lump of rock, but an egg hatching into an alien of unknown dangerousness, the Doctor refuses to settle the question of whether to destroy the moon or allow the alien to be born. It is expressly left with three humans - Clara, Courtney, and Lundvik - to decide. The resulting scene is interesting from the constitutional lawyer’s perspective because of two interlinking points it raises about human rights, democracy, and constitutionalism. This blog post seeks to briefly note these implications (other readings of the episode have of course been made: see for example this piece on the ‘Whovian Feminism’ blog about the episode’s relationship to abortion).

 

Determined abstainer: the Doctor on the Moon

 

1. The Doctor abandons the three humans to decide on the moon’s fate for the following reason: ‘there are moments in every civilization’s history in which the whole path of that civilization is decided … it’s your choice’. The message here is that humans must decide for themselves what moral values should underpin their new society and its laws. From the perspective of constitutional law, the significance of this scene can be explained with reference to the literature on referendums. Tierney (2009) argues that if the democratic legitimacy of the state ultimately founds on popular sovereignty, any structural alterations to the rules governing state powers demand the approval of that constituent power. As Levy (2013) states, referendums are designed to approve or disapprove of changes ‘intended to bind present and future citizens to defined public values, policies, and structures and limits on power’. Just as constitutional referendums are supposed to provide popular approval for a shift in fundamental legal principles, the Doctor intends that the moon’s future is determined by those whose fate it so profoundly affects. He recuses himself from the decision because, in his own words, ‘whatever future humanity might have depends upon the choice that is made right here, right now … I can’t make this decision for you … some decisions are too important not to take on your own’. This is humanity’s decision, and at the root of any legitimate constitutional order must be the ownership of that order by its citizens.

 

Watching the referendum result: Clara and Courtney

 

2. The second point arises from the fact that Clara’s ultimate decision seemingly goes against the majority’s wishes. After a global vote (albeit based around a dubious mechanism involving the moon-facing half of the Earth switching their lights on or off - some may seek the views of the other side of the globe, or those who had no electricity?) it becomes apparent that the consensus is in favour of destroying the moon. If this is the decision upon which Earth wishes to base its future, how can we reconcile Clara’s anti-majoritarian intervention with the founding of a constitutional order based on popular consensus? The answer lies in how fundamental rights protection fits into democracy and constitutions. In Freedom’s Law (1996) Dworkin argues that democracy is not purely about the majority will. It necessitates the protection of rights that, although they may not always serve the majority, protect the idea of equality upon which any legitimate constitutional and democratic order must be based. Dworkin terms this a ‘constitutional conception’ of democracy. Clara’s decision to protect the moon offers a Dworkinian twist on the constitutional referendum: a frustration of popular sovereignty that foregrounds fundamental rights within the constitutional order. The Earth’s future is based on the protection of basic equalities as well as the popular will. This is a form of constitutionalism that derives its legitimacy from not only a ‘founding moment’ of expressed constituent power. It is also founded on a recognition that a breach of fundamental rights - here the right to life - would be inimical to a legal order whose legitimacy flows from a commitment to equality. The newly constituted order cannot be allowed to make decisions that would take away the basic rights - here the right to life - of those within its jurisdiction, because this would contradict the basis of their new society, set to ‘spread across the stars’. Clara’s actions are an interesting exhibition of this approach to constitutionalism.

Bibliography

Ronald Dworkin, Freedom’s Law (Harvard UP 1996).
Ron Levy, ‘"Deliberative Voting": Reforming Constitutional Referendum Democracy’ [2013] Public Law 555.
Stephen Tierney, ‘Constitutional Referendums: A Theoretical Enquiry’ (2009) 72 Modern Law Review 360.

Money for old trope

By Danny Nicol,

University of Westminster

“Time Heist” (2014) is the first Doctor Who adventure involving an intergalactic bank.   The detailed plot of this spirited romp need not concern us here.  More interesting politically is what the story tells us about the bank.  We learn three things.  First, the bank exists for the benefit of the super-rich.  Secondly, when individuals get in its way, it is totally without mercy - to the point of murder.  Thirdly, this ruthlessness extends to its treatment of its own staff.

The Bank's security chief Ms Delphox - a bit of an
intergalactic dominatrix.
(Gosh Mr Moffat, you've never given us one of
those before!!)

On one level, the writers missed a trick.  There have been plenty of corporations in Doctor Who, but this was the first story to involve a company in the financial sector.  Unlike “Planet of the Ood” (2008), the episode does not place the corporation in its context. (I thank Dr. Joan Mahoney for this observation.)   Perhaps as a result, the criticism is rather rudimentary: the authors miss out on the opportunity for some biting satire on the banking crisis 2008 which severely damaged the British economy and did even greater harm elsewhere. 

Doctor Who's
 original entrepreneur,
Tobias Vaughn,
in league with Cybermen
in "The Invasion".

Stuff the company

On a more positive note, however, “Time Heist” shows Doctor Who’s astonishing consistency over time when it comes to the show’s unfavourable portrayal of the corporation.   The three features listed above were present in “The Invasion” (1968) and in a significant number of Doctor Who stories thereafter.  As regards the post-2005 show, there has also been remarkable consistency between the two show runners – Russell T. Davies (see e.g. “The Long Game” (2005), “Partners in Crime (2008)) and Steven Moffat (see e.g. “The Rebel Flesh”/“The Almost People” (2011), “The Bells of Saint John” (2013)).   Most interestingly, the show’s stance is markedly different from the cross-party consensus which has developed in British politics in favour of corporate domination (see David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (OUP, 2007)).  Doctor Who’s satire thus forms a remarkable contrast with British politicians’ thirty-year love affair with the corporation.

(The top of) One Tiny Damp Little Island Says "No"

By Danny Nicol, in a personal capacity



 

 Companionable hug:
Scottish Jamie, English Victoria

It is with profound relief that this blogger greets the "No" vote in the referendum on Scottish independence.  The Doctor's Scottish eyebrows might be poised to secede (see "Deep Breath" (2014)) but thankfully Scotland isn't. 

Doctor Who has consistently shown how love between the peoples of this tiny damp little island is stronger than negative sentiments.  Unlike Cassandra in "The End of the World" (2005), we've been mingling as the United Kingdom since 1707 (this blogger being one of the many descendants of such mingling) and I hope we continue to do so.




Married bliss, most of the time:
Scottish Amy, English Rory
 

Island of Love

I hope there isn't another "Indyref" in our lifetimes - I rather prefer Doctor Who's assumption that we stay together until the plebiscite on whether the Scots should leave the planet Earth on Starship UK along with the rest of us ("The Beast Below" (2010)).  But if there is another referendum, I hope that the people of England, Wales and Northern Ireland get a consultative vote before the Scottish poll, so that we can express to the people of Scotland how much we love them being part of our country.



Scottish Doctors with their Blackpool, London
and Perivale companions



Scholars convene to discuss Doctor Who's politics and law

On Friday 5th September Doctor Who scholars met at the University of Westminster to hear and discuss a wide range of papers on the politics and law of Doctor Who.

Topics included the show's politics, the Doctor's political morality, the role of law, lawyers and the Church, comparisons with other science fiction political texts, and the role of women in the programme.

One pervasive theme was the question (raised by the Doctor himself in the recent episode "Into the Dalek" (2014)) of whether he is, politically, a good man; another pervasive theme was the extent to which the contemporary show, through its depiction of women, promotes or undermines gender equality.

Professor Andrew Lynch and Dr Penny Crofts
speaking on "The New, Ruthless Doctor"

To give just a brief flavour: speaking on the impossible politics of Steven Moffat's story arcs, Professor Matt Hills argued that our object of study was less the text of the scripts but with the interpretations thereof: it was the interpretations which make Doctor Who political. As such, it is possible to find interpretations which find reactionary elements in the show (the portrayal of Amy Pond and River Song in subordinate or passive roles) as well as progressive ones (which depict Amy and River as strong women). Matt also argued that Steven Moffat's obession with playing around with time meant that political readings become highly provisional.

Addressing the feminine mystique of Doctor Who, Alyssa Franke argued that recent developments in the show reinforce the image of "happy housewife heroine", such as Amy ultimately adopting husband Rory's surname and the unspoken assumption that Amy's life was worthless without Rory. As such the representation of femininity has regressed. Women characters are assertive but comply with the Doctor's demands, a paternalistic Doctor who will save them.

Professor Danny Nicol on "Is the Doctor a war criminal?"

Talking on the Church's role, Dr Andrew Crome pointed to the new visibility of the Church being reflected in the programme, but at the same time being radically de-theologised, prioritising more the public good in the form of maintaining peace. He tackled questions inter alia about the role of women in Steven Moffat's vision of the Church, at one and the same time holding leadership positions, acting as authoritarian dominatrixes and serving as sex objects for the Doctor.

Organiser Professor Danny Nicol said he hoped this very enjoyable event would be the start not the finish of Westminster Law School's engagement with Doctor Who.

In defence of Harriet Jones

by Danny Nicol,
University of Westminster

At an academic gathering on Doctor Who I was criticised for describing Harriet Jones – a character who appears in three Doctor Who adventures - as the programme’s perfect Prime Minister, albeit not the Doctor’s. Apparently I had failed to appreciate that she’s “another Tony Blair”.  My own view is that the Tony Blair figure is in fact the Doctor himself: indeed, I rather suspect David Tennant played the Doctor with this in mind.  For the purposes of this blog post, however, I wish to defend Harriet Jones.

Harriet Jones: We know who you are

We meet Harriet as a backbench Member of Parliament in “Aliens of London”/”World War Three” (2005) when she is bothering Downing Street with a proposal to improve cottage hospitals.  Thus from the outset the writer associates her with the welfare state and National Health Service. We get no New Labour mantra from Harriet about targets and private sector involvement, the staple fare of the Blair and Brown governments: rather, she is driven in her quest for excellence by her mother’s experiences in hospital. 

The writer intends us to like Harriet Jones.  She tries to protect Rose Tyler – from Slitheen and Sycorax alike.  She purports to forbid the use of the Osterhagen Key, whereby Earth’s inhabitants could commit collective suicide.  Her endless proffering of her ID card and identifying herself, with the invariable response “I/We know who you are” is not just done for laughs: it establishes that she is, by prime ministerial standards, self-effacing.  At the same time she is decisive – prompting the Doctor to blow up Downing Street to do away with the Slitheen, as well as herself destroying the Sycorax.

Architect of Britain’s golden age

It’s easy to belittle economic policy when forming an assessment of Harriet Jones: indeed this is what the Doctor ultimately does, neatly reflecting the fact that he doesn’t have to live here.

Jones supporter: Jackie Tyler

“I’m 18 quid a week better off!  They’re calling it Britain’s golden age!” gushes Jackie Tyler in “The Christmas Invasion” (2005) when Jones is well established as Prime Minister.  Not being a political thriller, the politics of Doctor Who is often expressed in terse fashion – no bad thing.  We can extrapolate that the essence of the golden age is that Jones’ government has made working class people discernibly better off.  By contrast, real-life Britain has been characterised by the “growing gap between the very rich and the rest” with New Labour presiding over a “triumph of the super-rich” with “the reinvention of Britain as a massive tax-haven” (Robert Peston, Who Runs Britain? (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2008) 7-22).

Jones supporter: Wilf Mott.  He voted for her,
much to daughter Sylvia's consternation

Another element of our golden age appears to be independence from the USA, a perennial Doctor Who theme (see e.g. “The Tenth Planet” (1966), “The Tomb of the Cybermen” (1967)).  As regards the invasion of Iraq, Jones quips “I voted against that, thank you very much!”   In “The Christmas Invasion” she instructs: “You can tell the President – and please use these exact words – he is not my boss and he’s certainly not turning this into another war”.    But the anti-American theme is not entirely divorced from the question of making working class people better off: fear of America’s rugged capitalism was always a factor in the show’s hostility to US domination of Britain. (See generally Nicholas J. Cull, “Tardis at the OK Corral: Doctor Who and the USA”, in John R. Cook and Peter Wright (eds), British Science Fiction Television (London: IB Tauris, 2008)).

The Doctor is not always there

The Doctor falls out with Harriet, and gets her deposed, over her decision to fire missiles to destroy the retreating Sycorax.  It is the Doctor himself who puts forward the arguments which prompts her to destroy the Sycorax: that Earth is drawing attention to itself and that the Sycorax are likely to spread the word that the planet is up for grabs.  Firing on a retreating spaceship recalls Mrs Thatcher’s destruction of the retreating General Belgrano during the Falklands War.  However, Jones is defending her entire country and planet, so the metaphor is less strong than it first seems.  Jones is after all Prime Minister of a country, not a time traveller who flits around the universe: as such she has stronger reason to dispose of the Sycorax than the Doctor has for slaughtering the Silence or Twelfth Cyberlegion.  Indeed, it has been suggested that the Doctor is so appalled at Jones because he sees himself in her.  In any event, the Doctor's meddling in Britain's internal affairs creates the political space for Harold Saxon - in reality the Doctor's arch-enemy the Master - to become Prime Minister, with catastrophic results for the entire world ("The Sound of Drums"/"Last of the Time Lords" (2007)).

Jones makes the point that the Doctor isn’t always there to save the Earth.  This is perfectly valid: indeed the Doctor Who spin-offs Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures rather hang on this assumption.  In “The Stolen Earth” (2008) she says that she thought long and hard about whether the Doctor was right but concluded that he was wrong.  The message is that we cannot rely on an ultimate rescuer, be it the Doctor or the USA.

In the end, in resisting the Daleks Harriet sacrifices herself for the rest of us: “My life doesn’t matter, not if it saves the Earth”.  The Harriet Jones trilogy is significant because - like the first few Doctor Who stories of 1963 and 1964 - it prompts viewers to come to an independent judgment on the central political questions of right and wrong, rather than endlessly deferring to the judgments of the show’s “hero”.

Vengeance on Varos: or, why English and Welsh trials aren’t televised

by David Yuratich, Bournemouth University

The opening scene of Vengeance On Varos (1985) contains a familiar dystopian trope.  A prisoner is being tortured live on TV.  This 'entertainment' is presumably being televised across the whole planet, although the episode focuses on the responses of Arak and Etta, a couple watching in their living room.  Rather than being traumatised, they are bored. 'Not him again?' says Arak, before complaining 'when did we last see a decent execution?'. Etta, who appears entranced by the programme, reminds him that there was one last week, at which point the two bicker about whether or not that ‘episode’ was a repeat. Clearly this barbarity has been normalised.  Equally worringly, it soon becomes apparent that when the Governor wishes to implement a new policy, citizens vote through their TV screens - and if they vote ‘no’, he dies live on air.  Throughout the episode the two discuss various scenes of torture and oppression as if they were fictional programmes: ‘'I like that one [the Doctor], the one in the funny clothes!'; 'I like this section, I wonder if they know what's waiting?’; ‘Here comes the acid bath!’.

Viewers of Varos: Etta and Arak engage with the planet's televisual offerings

These events are similar to trials: the prisoner is on public display for questioning, and citizens are called upon to decide the fate of the governor.  These scenes reflect English and Welsh (Scottish and Northern Irish law is different) anxieties about televising justice. Varos usefully epitomises, albeit exaggeratedly, the uneases that have informed a cautious attitude to televising trials.  At present these are are not recorded or televised.  By trials I mean the initial criminal court case where a defendant's guilt or innocence is established.  In contrast to trials, appeals are now often recorded and/or transmitted. The Supreme Court streams selected cases through the internet, and has an excellent YouTube channel where lawyers, law students, and no doubt some slightly bored members of the public can view recordings of their judgments.  Earlier this year the Court of Appeal also started to record selected cases, although this is primarily for the media to use in reporting; it seems more difficult for the public to access them online.

The Supreme Court’s proceedings, which are only ever appeals, can be recorded and broadcast thanks to Section 47 of the Constitutional Reform Act 2005. The situation for other courts is governed by the Crime and Courts Act 2013.  It does not explicitly ban the practice being extended into criminal trials. Section 32(1) of the Act allows the Lord Chancellor, with the ‘concurrence’ of the Lord Chief Justice, to make orders that permit the recording of images or sound in courts. There are two main barriers to this.  First, under Section 32(1)(b), it can be made subject to ‘prescribed conditions’ including the agreement of the parties involved. Second, under Section 32(3), a recording order may be suspended 'in the interests of justice or in order that a person is not unduly prejudiced'.  Given that both these safeguards are broadly-phrased, they may prove difficult to define precisely; instead they seem primarily governed by matters of policy.  Why then has the potential extension of recording not taken place?  Why has the Lord Chief Justice recently told the House of Lords Constitution Committee that he would like a ‘pause’ to take stock of current practice before going any further? And how exactly does Varos serve as a useful illustration of those fears?

Three complaints are played out particularly well in this episode.  Specifically the concerns here relate to about televising trials, and not about publicising them through other mediums: they are usually open to the public and are reported and tweeted about regularly. Vengeance on Varos helps illustrate a distinct set of issues that arise when broadcasting trials.  First, justice may become a spectacle.  The act of televising transforms what the people of Varos should see shameful events (torture and death) into a commodified, not-quite real event situated on the border between reality and fiction. As rued by another character later on, ‘the spectacle of death is our only entertainment’ whilst one of the villains is delighted at the ‘prime time viewing’. Guilt has apparently been assumed just because the accused is on TV; the truth is irrelevant.  As a consequence of the trials being seen as entertainment, a second issue arises: detachment. Arak and Etta do not take what they are seeing seriously. They dehumanise those on display. They forget that they are watching real people in real pain or facing real consequences - recall the argument about whether they were watching a repeat. The accused becomes ‘other’ and the watchers simply do not care what happens to them.  The third issue arises from the fact that viewers vote for the Governor’s fate.  His destiny is not decided by a jury or by evidence - it is settled by the gut feelings of the watching public. Opinion, not fact, is what matters here.

The events on Varos are of course dystopian.  Nonetheless, the three points above are, to varying extents, caricatures of the real concerns that inform the policy reasons against extending the recording of court proceedings in the UK.  Helena Kennedy warns that the solemnity required by fair trials - respecting the rights of the accused to make their case, to make sure decisions are made on evidence, and so on - could be eroded if trials were televised.  This is because the events could easily become sensationalised by the media.  The accused might become dehumanised; edited or distorted images from the trial could influence the jury or dictate the public perception of the accused’s guilt whatever the verdict actually is; this potential threat to the idea of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ has been cited by one New Zealand judge as a reason to ban recording in their courtroom.  The Ministry of Justice itself has recognised this potential problem and states that ‘the Government and the Judiciary will not permit our courts to become show trials for media entertainment’.  Richard Sherwin goes further, warning that blurring the lines between law and entertainment could lead to the law going ‘pop’: if criminal trials are seen as entertainment then their legitimacy as a forum for determining guilt and innocence may dissolve, threatening the rule of law that he sees as underpinning a liberal democratic society.  Indeed, so numbed are Arak and Etta to reality that when the Doctor eventually prevails and the broadcasts are stopped, they cannot comprehend the ‘real world’.

One can look at the ongoing Oscar Pistorius trial as a real illustration of these problems. Its coverage has in many ways focused less on criminal proceedings and more on personalities and a rather distasteful non-legal narrative about celebrities.  Lord Chief Justice Thomas, in the evidence referred to earlier, cryptically said that he was ‘troubled’ by the events in South Africa, but did not wish to expand. Without wanting to put words into his mouth, it is quite possible that he was referring to some of the concerns noted above.

Vengeance on Varos clearly contains representations, albeit exaggerated, of the policy reasons that for now prevent English and Welsh courts from televising trials.  This is one of the great utilities of popular culture: it can place visualisations of important ideas and arguments into an easily-accessible arena.  Not all the arguments against televising trials are covered in Varos of course - there is little material in there about the potential impact on witnesses for example. Similarly, the episode’s setting does not necessarily lend itself to a celebration of the potential benefits of greater transparency to things such as public education.  It is nonetheless a fascinating hour and a half’s viewing for public lawyers.