Facebook page for “Peter Capaldi is the 12th doctor fan girls get over it.”

When Peter Capaldi was unveiled as the new Doctor Who in August, The Daily Mail reported an “ageism row” as fans purportedly dubbed Peter Capaldi “’too old’ to play the Time Lord.” Although The Daily Mail cited negative responses from both male and female viewers and included positive responses from female fans, the negative responses were quickly ascribed in much of the press, and on social media, to “fangirls.” Witness the Facebook page, “Peter Capaldi is the 12th doctor fan girls get over it.” In claiming that fangirls alone were critical of the choice of the new Doctor, people simultaneously dismissed fangirls as lesser fans than male fans or “true” Whovians, and assumed that fangirl interest in the show was exclusively romantic or sexual, that Capaldi was seen negatively because he was not as erotically attractive as recent actors David Tennant, or Matt Smith. This, despite such fangirl reactions as the YouTube video “Peter Capaldi is the new Doctor! (A fangirl’s thoughts on this),” posted immediately after the announcement in which the self-identified fangirl says she is “glad it is not a younger guy. I am tired of these plot lines between the Doctor and his companions and all this… sexual tension.” As L.B. Gale writes in his online essay “In Defense of Doctor Who Fangirls,” “The assumption behind this ‘true Who fans’ conversation is that the ‘true fans’ are the geeky men who were able to get the ‘big ideas about humanity’ behind the show while the fair weather fans were all the little girls who were just pornographically enjoying the series because of how good looking Smith and Tennant are” The dismissal of fangirls is familiar to those of us who study pop culture as a stereotypical denigration of feminized mass culture in opposition to masculine “art.” It assumes that female fans are an add-on, derivative, and lesser than male fandom, which is assumed to be motivated by more serious interests (e.g., the vagaries of time travel vs. the appeal of TV stars).

In opposition, I would like to suggest that fangirls are not one fandom among many, or an add-on to the Whovian empire, but the ur-fans of Doctor Who, the original targeted audience and point of identification within the show. Jill Lepore’s recent New Yorker essay on Doctor Who (“The Man in the Box: Fifty Years of Doctor Who”) makes clear that capturing a female audience was essential to the show’s original plan. When Sydney Newman, then head of BBC drama, decided to produce a science fiction series, he commissioned a report that argued against doing so: the report claimed that sci-fi was not only too American, but also, and more problematically, too unappealing to women. Intending to create a “loyalty program” that people would watch every week, and one that would appeal to women as much as men, Newman decided to “flout the genre’s conventions.” Newman hired Verity Lambert, the only female producer at the BBC, and together they determined that the Doctor should have a female companion to “add feminine interest.” Thus, the companion provides a relay for female viewers, a point of identification within the show.

Given the companions’ penchant for crushing on the Doctor, at least in the recent series (“all that sexual tension” the fangirl YouTube video cites), is it any surprise that young women might identify with Rose, Martha, Donna, Amy, and Clara? All of whom, except perhaps Donna, at one point or another kiss and/or flirt with the Doctor. The companion is a built-in fangirl, one who encounters the Doctor accidentally, but once let into the Tardis (bigger on the inside, like a TV, as Lepore notes) commits to a “loyalty program” of traveling with him, leaving her everyday life behind (even bringing her boyfriend along for the ride in the case of Martha and Amy) – a life that Keara Goin says in her previous Antenna blog in this series is “made to seem secondary, bland, and lacking excitement.”

Osgood (Ingrid Oliver) in “The Day of the Doctor.”

The importance of the fangirl to the series, and her embeddedness within it, was reaffirmed in the 50th anniversary “The Day of the Doctor.” This episode featured among its characters a young geeky girl, Osgood (Ingrid Oliver), wearing the fourth Doctor’s scarf like a cos-playing fangirl, and enthusing over the Doctor, whose exploits she has studied. In this special episode, former companion Rose Tyler (Billie Piper) plays the Time Lord’s “conscience,” and wittily describes the basic premise of the series when she notes that he is “stuck between a girl and a box – story of your life, eh Doctor?” Here, the Doctor’s conscience reminds us that the fangirl fantasy is not external to the show but stitched into the fabric of the narrative, the essential story of the Doctor.

Nonetheless, while fangirls have been ascribed a certain role within the narrative and as spectators, fangirls have veered from the plot in fascinating ways. Looking around on tumblr, the fangirl epicenter, one finds numerous sites dedicated to Doctor Who. In addition to cute images of Tennant and Smith, or fantasy “ships” (or fan fantasy relationships) of the Doctor and his companion, there were images of Daleks, GIFs that celebrated reading (quoting the Doctor’s claim that books are the “best weapons in the world”), and archival images detailing the history of the show and sorting its timey-wimey logic. There are frequent gay “ships” related to the Tennant’s Doctor and captain Jack Harkness (John Barrowman), auteurist links between Steven Moffat’s Sherlock and his Doctor Who episodes in queer Sherlock “ships” between Sherlock and Watson or Sherlock and the Doctor, or pages that juxtapose fandoms for Harry Potter, Supernatural, The Hobbit, and more. Assuming that fangirl activity is limited to expressions of heterosexual attachment to young actors denies the range and complexity of these responses. It is a misplaced fantasy about the girl’s proper place in the Whovian universe.

You may well have noticed that this year is Doctor Who’s fiftieth anniversary. A number of the show’s prior anniversaries have featured what fans like to call “multi-Doctor” stories in which different incarnations of the good Doctor team up to fight evil together. “The Three Doctors” (1972—3), “The Five Doctors” (1983), and “Dimensions in Time” (1993) have all contributed to this subgenre of Time Lord entertainment, but the multi-Doctor story hasn’t just been a birthday gift. TARDIS Wikia lists some 77 such stories, many of them hailing from officially-licensed comic strips and short stories. Indeed, the Big Finish Short Trips series accounts for some 20 or so multi-Doctor stories just by itself. What gets counted, and what gets left out, remains a matter of debate in this exercise: for instance, TARDIS Wikia rather pointedly includes unmade “The Dark Dimension” and excludes “Dimensions in Time” (infamous for upsetting long-term Who fans with its EastEnders crossover and almost total incoherence).

These “specials” may appear to be in danger of becoming slightly less special in 2013, however. Arguably, there are no less than four multi-Doctor stories currently on the go or pending: “The Day of the Doctor” on TV for the anniversary day of November 23rd, and Big Finish’s audio adventure “The Light at the End,” along with IDW’s licensed “Prisoners of Time” and Big Finish/AudioGO’s “Destiny of the Doctor.” The latter two efforts don’t need to involve actors who played the Doctor – just their likenesses and descriptions – whilst Big Finish’s own special release features all of the “classic” Doctors via performance or technological trickery. Finally, the BBC TV special looks set to involve Matt Smith and David Tennant, plus John Hurt as a previously unknown incarnation, as well as possibly another “classic” Doctor.

Multi-Doctor stories are special to fans for a variety of reasons. They help to bind together Doctor Who’s vast narrative world, suggesting that rather than a series of different eras and production phases, all the Doctors are simultaneously whizzing through time and space, and might bump into each other at any moment. Converting production contingencies into a co-present Whoniverse is a handy trick, but multi-Doctor TV stories also emphasize what Paul Booth calls in Time on TV a “temporal displacement” of incarnations. Assorted Doctors are taken out of their timestreams and timelines (in production terms, the 1960s through to the noughties) and combined in potentially nostalgic confections. Amy Holdsworth’s book Television, Memory and Nostalgia ends by taking “Time Crash” (2007) as emblematic of how TV engages with past and present: “Time Crash” is, we’re told, “not a collapse of past and present but an affectionate evocation of television’s significance to our understanding of and relationship to both.” All this, and a decorative vegetable too.

But Holdsworth is right to draw attention to how past and present are set in new relationships by these time crashes or collisions. Indeed, it could be argued that returning actors, re-inhabiting roles they may not have played on TV for quite some time, are likely to create pastiches of prior performances, mannerisms, and catchphrases. And as Richard Dyer has so eloquently noted, at its best pastiche allows audiences to know themselves “affectively as historical beings.”

A small number of Doctors get their “Day”?

So, does “The Day of the Doctor” look set to work in this way? I would suggest not: its publicity poster (pictured above) stresses Smith and Tennant, with Hurt relegated to a far smaller image. Rather than audiences being inspired to reflect on their relationship to some fifty years of pop-cultural TARDIS travel, only a production span of seven years or so is called to mind (2006—13), making this both a curiously compressed relationship between (recent) past and present as well as one which focuses strongly on more youthful Doctors. Hurt’s older figure seems likely to be a villainous version of our protagonist, as well as representing a new face rather than a reminder of earlier productions. Of course “The Day of the Doctor” resonates, as a title, with the anniversary date and its global premiere along with #savetheday hashtag. Youth-orientated media culture seems well served here, as does a kind of event TV “presentism” that’s slightly at odds with a special assumed to commemorate fifty years. It’s not about decades of the Doctor, it’s about a “day.” And it’s not about ageing actors cueing memories of past Who, it’s about two fresh-faced TV stars and a guesting big name thesp. Peter Capaldi’s imminent tenure suggests the show isn’t afraid of older Doctors, but on the strength of “The Day of the Doctor” and its current paratextual presence, you’d be hard pushed not to feel that it wants to brush Doctor Who’s age, and the passing of production time, under the carpet of Rassilon.

And then there’s the matter of multiple multi-Doctor tales. Rather than cohering across media platforms, these seem to float in their own islands of quasi-canonicity. “The Light at the End” can presumably only feature Doctors one through to eight as a result of Big Finish’s standard license, while Big Finish/AudioGO and IDW get a shot at “the eleven Doctors.” Perhaps comic book readers are felt to be more attuned to “team-up” stories, but each of these audio/comic adventures feature monthly releases focused on a different Doctor, eventually layering into a sequence featuring all incarnations (and perhaps allowing greater interaction between them as the anniversary year comes to a head). Instead of primarily uniting Doctors in a magical, memory-spanning collision of past and present, these reunions and recombinations seem driven by medium-specific release patterns (an audio or comic a month makes industrial sense: a TV episode a month ranging across incarnations would be extremely quirky scheduling). And alongside industry release patterns, these multi-multi-Doctor “specials” are also conspicuously delimited by commercial licensing deals: Big Finish can unite “classic” Doctors in “The Light at the End,” even if the TV series seems intent on limiting itself to current and previous incumbents (more temporal compression than temporal displacement). The outcome seems surprisingly fragmented for what could be a grand bridging of all eras.

“Classic” Doctors reunited.

There is a more celebratory interpretation, mind you: perhaps Doctor Who’s big day has not fallen entirely prey to marketing ploys, event TV presentism, and BBC Worldwide licensing deals. Perhaps the decision to focus on a smaller number of Doctors than fans might have expected isn’t such a bad thing (“The Day of the Doctor” could almost be entitled “The Two Doctors” or “The Three Doctors,” depending on your view of the John Hurt/missing incarnation revelation). After all, “The Five Doctors” has been criticized by Jim Leach for a “breathless and diffuse” narrative resulting from the effort to cram in so many protagonists, while Keith M. Johnston accurately describes ‘Dimensions in Time’ as “Doctor Who reduced to visual spectacle… dispens[ing] with narrative logic to offer the programme’s ‘greatest hits’.” The spectacle of seeing many Doctors on screen – an unusual special effect, to be sure – apparently works against narrative. By focusing only (or primarily) on Doctors Ten and Eleven, “The Day of the Doctor” implicitly responds to generations of fan disappointment and critique aimed at multi-Doctor stories. It’s concerned with telling a strong story rather than providing excessive “Doctor porn” (a lot like “continuity porn,” but focused on the Doctor’s different guises). Fans incessantly engage in aesthetic debate over what makes good Who, and “The Day of the Doctor,” written by a producer-fan, strikes me as highly cognizant of previous fan discussions and aesthetic commentaries (spectacle over narrative; incoherence over structure) that have surrounded the “multi-Doctor” category.

Mannequin mania?

In the end, what may be particularly special about all these “specials” is the extent to which they combine industry sense (release patterns; licensing; promotional “stings” and hashtags; restricted paratextual publicity) with fannish critique (“too many Doctors spoils the TV storytelling”). And this epic collision between fandom and brand management offers a different kind of multiplicity altogether.