How Doctor Who Changed the Way I See My Home Life
I’ve been watching Doctor Who for 35 years now — but the world’s longest-running sci-fi series can still surprise me. Recently I found myself idly thinking about the physicality of what the Doctor actually does in the TARDIS console room, when suddenly a startling realization stopped me in my tracks. It’s a thought that has begun to reshape some of my fundamental perspectives on the show, the character, and even my own family life.
Here it is:
The TARDIS console room, in spirit, is a kitchen.
Picture a happy family kitchen. It’s a room designed for practical functionality, not for lounging, right? The proper sitdown meal happens over in the dining room, and the comfy armchairs are in the living room. And yet, inevitably, it’s the kitchen where people find themselves hanging out while Mom cooks dinner — talking distractingly at her as she works busily at the counter, jiggling any number of arcane devices in hopes of making everything come out right and in time.
Doesn’t that image map perfectly onto the scene of the Doctor spinning around the TARDIS console, pulling this knob and twirling those dials and banging that panel, while one or more companions ask what’s going on and what can they do and hey, is that bell supposed to be ringing?
I might never have noticed the visual similarity if my partner Valya and I hadn’t spent an intensive few months in our kitchen writing a cookbook, but once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it. As I watched Valya at the stove bouncing from burner to burner, hopping in a little semicircle around me to slide a pan into the sink and then reaching back over the other side of the counter to smack the toaster knob down one more time, all I could hear in my head was the vworp vworp vworp of the TARDIS time rotor groaning into reluctant action.
I realized that the console room’s vibe is a lot more like a kitchen than it is like, say, a ship’s bridge, where a crew operate under strict military discipline, or a tinkerer’s garage, where the stakes are far less urgent. In a kitchen, like in the TARDIS, we have to get this thing done in the next few minutes, and if we don’t, everything will be ruined, and I know you want to help but honestly I’m the only one who can do it right and you’re so kind to offer but would you please step out of the way?
This similarity resonates so strongly, I think, because the TARDIS isn’t just a vehicle — it’s the sanctuary where the Doctor lives. While transportation is its function in the show’s plot, home is its role in the character’s life.
Now, this idea raises quite a few ramifications.
If the Doctor’s primary domestic activity space at home — the place where that good old Time Lord magic gets made — is the functional equivalent of the kitchen, then that aligns our hero mythically more with the archetype of the mother-witch, not the father-king.
It’s not fair, of course, that our culture historically associates the kitchen arts with femininity. But it does, and we see that association depicted over and over again in myths about women working powerful magic: the bubbling cauldron in Macbeth, the gingerbread house and oven in “Hansel & Gretel,” the poison apple that takes out Snow White.
All of which is to say: At the subtextual level, the Doctor had some nonbinary gender stuff going on for an awful long time before Jodie Whitaker’s 13th incarnation came along.
(Of course, deep down, you knew that already. If you stop and think about it, every time the Doctor has regenerated, the new incarnation has incorporated a bit of the essence of the last one’s closest companions, most of whom were women. But that’s another essay all its own.)
Coming at this from a different perspective: If the TARDIS console is like a kitchen counter, then every astonishing act of time-and-space travel — every unique, cross-chrono-cosmic zigzag from a working-class estate block in London to a robotic battlefield on the planet Skaro or a 16th-century Aztec temple or a luxury space station in the year four billion and seven — is like a transdimensional recipe, one that only produces just the right outcome if the Doctor’s long-practiced hodgepodge of control-twiddling ritual and improvisation includes all the right ingredients and adjustments at all the right moments.
That analogy feels legit to me. Because just like cooking, piloting the TARDIS successfully is neither entirely a rigorous science nor entirely a personal art, but an alchemic fusion of both the left brain and the right.
What’s more, if what we find when we walk through the TARDIS doors feels like a kitchen, then the endless, motley assortment of stray youngsters and neighbors who show up in it, hungry for tastes of life they aren’t getting at home, makes a lot more sense.
If the TARDIS is a kitchen, then the Doctor’s sometimes unsettling tendency to swerve between acting like your overprotective mother one minute and like Gordon Ramsay the next also makes a lot more sense.
And if the TARDIS is a kitchen, then it suddenly becomes even clearer why we’ve spent the past several decades quietly certain that both Mary Poppins and Willy Wonka are Time Lords, too. She’s a wizard of domestic transdimensionalism; he’s a master of culinary super-science.
Now, let me turn that equation around.
If prepping and carrying out a recipe for some potentially wonderful dish in my kitchen has always subconsciously felt like plotting and executing a trip to a colorful alien world in the TARDIS, I understand better why I’ve always enjoyed cooking so much even though I’m not especially brilliant at it. When I feed people, I’m immersing them in a sensory experience that they wouldn’t have had without me taking them there.
This also makes it clear why the Doctor needs companions so badly. It’s the same reason I crave dinner guests: Cooking for friends is so much more satisfying than cooking for yourself.
I always knew that was true, but I didn’t really understand it until Valya and I moved in together. While I enjoyed cooking, it was still just a thing I did because one must — as my mom always liked to say, “We eat to live, we don’t live to eat.” Valya, though, has devoted herself for many years to figuring out how to merge life’s necessities with life’s joys, and a consciously thoughtful approach to food as a fundamental part of existence is one of the centerpieces of that philosophy. Seeing the profound happiness she finds in sharing meals with her loved ones has helped me recognize that experiencing food together is just as intimate as experiencing a grand adventure together — or maybe even more so.
In retrospect, I see that this was always true in my life, even if I wasn’t conscious of it. Was the look on Rose Tyler’s face the first time the Doctor showed her an alien landscape really so different from the look that crossed my own the first time I let my mom talk me into trying the astonishing deliciousness of buttery, sauteed sea scallops? And was my mom’s knowing delight in having curated my newfound pleasure not thoroughly identifiable as a big cheeky Tom Baker grin?
Exploring the world’s wonders through the sense of taste may not be exactly the same thing as exploring them through physically traveling across the entire universe. But it’s a good start.
Stephen H. Segal is the Hugo Award-winning former editor of Weird Tales magazine. He and his partner Valya Dudycz Lupescu are the authors of the new fantasy-and-philosophy-inspired cookbook Forking Good: An Unofficial Cookbook for Fans of The Good Place.
