Girls can time travel too.
Doctor Who has never traded in the seriousness of ‘hard’ science fiction, often laden with po-faced predictions of humanity’s hand-spun fate at the mercy of the technologies and the politics it creates. It’s more a fairytale spacetime cabaret — an exploration of the gloriously impossible rather than merely the improbable, which celebrates a universe in which the world can be set to rights by kick-boxing space zombies into the next dimension with the Power of Love. But the show’s unremitting silliness the seriousness with which it’s treasured in the cryptic heart of the anglophone cultural imaginary. The wellspring of a thousand weepy adolescent fanfics, and a thousand grown men spending their Saturdays making fiendishly clever costumes out of tin foil and cardboard. But maybe this is unsurprising. To call it just a silly story rather misses the importance of silly stories.
Doctor Who, which has always been something of an ideological chameleon. Whatever your political inclination, you will likely find something in the , you’ll mostly likely find in the rip-roaring tumble of glorious nonsense, something to mirror back your own particular vision of the world. Right-wingers will find a history whose course is steered largely by the occasionally murderous but ultimately noble acts of a single great white hero, aided by a trusty female sidekick. Leftists can excavate coded critiques of capitalism, imperialism and the machinery of war. But up until now, one single thread has bound together the sometimes baffling contradictions. That whatever stories are made, they are made largely about and largely by men.
So cherished is this narrative that many frothing internauts have taken to their keyboards in outrage that the new doctor is a woman.
The perennial response goes that it is utterly implausible that the Doctor could be a woman, after fifty-odd years gracing our television screens in familiar man-shape. Mark Collett, greasy basement-dweller and author of ‘The Fall of Western Man’ was apoplectic, tweeting: “The new Dr Who is a woman! I wonder if they will top it off with a black love interest & a weedy white cuck assistant that she friendzones?” Suspending for a moment the fact that that is obviously an amazing line-up and I would be totally here for it — clearly, it is of utmost importance to defend even the silliest of stories, when they remind men that they and they alone can be trusted with the duty of saving the universe, time and time again.
People have also raised concerns that a woman could travel back to any time beyond the 1960s and still find herself taken as seriously as a male doctor. The Doctor does six impossible things before breakfast and rounds it off with Lunch on the third moon of Jupiter. The character can defeat planet-killing hordes of deadly ghosts, psychic snow and invasions of space-spiders. But it seems defeating the vicissitudes of human male contempt seems rather a bridge too far. Those who readily suspend disbelief in aliens, time travel, space whales, diamond planets and killer clockwork spiral into full-on meltdown when asked to contemplate the possibility of women being in a leading role. (Fans easily swallowed the idea that the Master, the embodiment of Time Lord evil, could suddenly flip genders. Perhaps the idea that a woman can be conniving and devilish is an easier sell.)
Which rather is telling of the enormous stranglehold that patriarchy has over our imaginations. One twitter user @scotti2427 summed up the problem. “Can’t actually think of anything worse. End of Doctor Who for me after 43 years.” He’s spent forty three years watching planets crumble and humanity threatened a hundred times by a hundred different kinds of monster, and still couldn’t think of anything worse than a woman in charge. And that pretty nearly encapsulates what’s going on here: that the unfailing and unimpeachable presumption of male supremacy represents nothing less than a failure of imagination. This particular piece of spacetime genderfuckery presents a huge sweep of narrative possibilities — how will the Doctor contend with being flung far into the past, or to the outermost limits of the galaxy — and how will a female doctor toy with our expectations of what and who gets to play the hero? It raises a hundred questions; the Doctor has a wife — does this mean that the Time Lord is not just a woman, but a queer woman to boot?
Does this mean that the Doctor is gender fluid, or that gender is just another one of the quirks of regeneration — like age or hairstyle, or in the latest case, Scottishness? In the face of these possibilities, male supremacy is the brain-killer, a failure of imagination sousing the spark of narrative complexity.
And more importantly, the following should by now be clear: that representation matters. Allowing little girls to see themselves as the heroes is a seed change not simply in the fairytale world of Doctor Who, but in our own world as well. It represents the rather daring contention that perhaps girls can change history too, even if they’re not flaunting the rules of causality to do it. A victory for women here is also a victory for storytelling. — and vice versa. I‘m only a little sad that when I was a kid watching old Doctor Who re-runs, no one on screen was there to remind me that girls can time travel too.
