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.

Just as fundamental to Doctor Who as the Doctor himself (the gendering of who needs to be addressed separately in its own post), the various companions are right at the Doctor’s side for his adventures in time and space.  In her work on Doctor Who, Lindy A. Orthia (2010) succinctly characterizes the traditional role of the Doctors’ companions: “Dramatically, the function of companions is threefold: (a) to scream and be rescued, (b) to enable the plot to be explained to viewers, and (c) to provide a point of identification for viewers” (54).  The primary companions since the show’s return in 2005—Rose, Martha, Donna, and Amy—maintain this role, yet are at the same time depicted in a post-feminist fashion that suggests that even though the Doctor is represented as smarter, wiser, more educated, and over all better suited for travel through time and space, these women are empowered to make their own decisions and take independent actions as they accompany the Doctor.  However, as the “companion” their real-time lives are made to seem secondary, bland, and lacking excitement.  Life with the Doctor is often constructed as an escape; they are rescued from banality by a white Time Lord in a blue box.  They might disagree with the Doctor, disobey his wishes, and talk back to him, but, in the end, it is the Doctor who saves the day.  These post-feminist heroines, while clearly distinguishable from dependent sidekick companions from the show’s first few decades, still easily fit into the Doctor-companion model described by Margaret and Michael Rustin (2008), in  “The Regeneration of Doctor Who”, where “The Doctor…took an innocent younger companion on adventures in his special vehicle, and on these adventures protects her and everyone else from danger” (146).  But what about the Doctor’s newest companion, Clara?  Is she just a reincarnation of this ubiquitous model?

Rose, Martha, Donna, and Amy

Played by British actor Jenna-Louise Coleman, the character of Clara Oswald is really a series of characters, all similarly named and appearing physically identical.  Referred to by the Doctor (portrayed by Matt Smith) as “the impossible girl” (“The Bells of St. John”), Clara is a mystery both to audiences and the Doctor.  From the viewers’ perspective, Clara is a character that seems to be immortal, sacrificing her own life to save the Doctor again and again.  She runs into the Doctor multiple times, across time and space, each time playing the pivotal role in the Doctor’s success and survival.  “Feisty” (“Journey to the Center of the Tardis”), brave, and independent like her predecessors, Clara finds her travels with the Doctor thrilling.  Yet the fashion in which the show frames her as a companion is different.  Her real-time life is sacrificed in order to replicate herself into what character River Song calls “echoes” (“The Name of the Doctor”); splicing herself in order to be present at every point in the Doctor’s timeline.  Clara’s identity is created as inextricably linked to that of the Doctor, her sole purpose to exist caught up in the fabric of the Doctor’s timeline.

Clara’s Self Sacrifice as She Jumps into the Doctor’s Timeline

As Alec Charles (2008) has previously noted in“The War Without End?”, “It is [the Doctor’s] human companions, his surrogate family, who provide not only the emotional center and the moral compass but also the dramatic and diegetic motivation for the series” (459).  Yet, in the case of Clara, her role is more than just indeterminate member of his surrogate family; she is his surrogate mother.  Connoted as irrefutably maternal—most explicitly shown through her employment as a Victorian governess in “The Snowmen” and a nanny in what could be understood as her real-time life—it could be argued that Clara is merely the traditional mother archetype, just re-packaged.  In the final episode of the current series, “The Name of the Doctor,” she explains to the viewer that “I’m born, I live, I die.  And always there’s the Doctor.”  It is at the end of this episode that we are provided the answer to the question: Who is Clara?  She tells the audience “Always I’m running to save the Doctor.  Again, and again, and again…I’ve always been there, right from the beginning.”  Taking on the responsibility of the Doctor’s well-being, Clara positions herself as the Doctor’s caretaker.

Clara is there to Save Every Regeneration of the Doctor

Clara’s independence and brash nature can seem like a break with the normative femininity that framed the characterization of the previous companions. However, the revelation that this companion was “born to save the Doctor” ultimately aligns her with a regime of representation that constructs motherhood, and the self-sacrifice inherent in that, as the paramount purpose of women.  Yet as a character that has redefined the Doctor-companion relationship, Clara is able to stand apart from the more recent post-feminist companions by flipping the savior-saved dynamic on its head; simultaneously fulfilling the traditional, modern, and re-imagined companion roles.

This is the second post in Antenna’s new series The Cultural Lives of Doctor Who, commemorating the television series’ fiftieth anniversary and its lasting cultural legacy. If you missed Matt Hills’ inaugural post earlier this month, you can read it here. Stay tuned for regular posts in the series throughout the remaining months of 2013.

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.

Participants at the Doctor Who: Walking in Eternity conference. Photo: Howard Berry.

During the first week of September I travelled to the University of Hertfordshire in the UK to attend the Walking in Eternity conference, which marked the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who. The small size of the event, coupled with the quiet pre-term campus, gave a comfortable, cozy feeling to the event, far from the crush of the typical large conference, and even more intimate than Flow. Hats off to Kim Akass and the staff at UH for being fantastic hosts (and for the copious coffee breaks!), and for even working in appearances from K9 and a Dalek (and Mat Irvine, one of the people responsible for the original series’ effects and props). Not many academic conferences feature scholars turning into beaming fans upon the sight of a “shooty dog thing.”

The papers presented explored many key aspects of the series, and its relationships to larger issues in media culture. What came out was simultaneously a sincere acknowledgment of the show’s unique status in British cultural history, and a critique of that role. The keynote presentations throughout the event clearly had this sense of assessment in mind. For James Chapman, who opened the conference, it was reconsidering Doctor Who as a media and cultural institution through its four key moments: its inception in the 1960s, its ritualization in the 1970s, its steep decline in the 1980s, and its global rebirth since 2005. All along the way, the series’ relationship to the broader public and BBC internal politics have been key to its changing stature. Matt Hills’ talk (based on his article in the new anthology he edited) gauged Doctor Who’s various anniversaries from “naive” through “hyped.” He raised the important issue of how we commemorate any event, since any marking of time is situated in particular cultural and industrial contexts (e.g., the recent rise of “fanfac” in many fandoms, and the fact that an anniversary-timed academic conference on Doctor Who even exists). On the final day, Lorna Jowett’s self-proclaimed “rant of a lifetime” offered a scathing but well-deserved critique of the series’ persistently disappointing treatment of women. While the new series has at times undercut the Doctor’s patriarchy and masculinity, and has offered potentially intriguing female companions, it has also consistently stuck them in dependent and damaged relationships with the Doctor. As this year’s loud and serious call for a female Doctor indicated (before Peter Capaldi’s casting announcement), the series’ traditional treatment of gender is increasingly becoming untenable. Jowett’s critique was echoed in similar papers throughout the conference, including Teresa Forde’s examination of companions’ memories of the Doctor, and Bethan Jones’ intriguing examination of fanfic writers’ reactions to the controversial 2011 episode “The Girl Who Waited.”

Other papers similarly reconsidered the series’ role in wider cultural discussions. Julian Chambliss and Richard Wallace both focused on the series in the context of 1980s politics. Chambliss tied the series’ cult popularity in the US in the 1980s to both a fashionable anglophilia and an argument for public broadcasting (and public dissent) against Reagan-era commercialism and conservatism. Similarly, Wallace identified how the series itself reacted to Thatcher with a series of Thatcheresque female villains and satires of big business, culminating in 1988’s “The Happiness Patrol.” Taking it to the present on the same panel, Claire Jenkins showed how Matt Smith’s Doctor and celebrity persona indicate a decidedly masculine and heterosexual “geek chic,” in alignment with contemporaries like Alexander McQueen and Pharrell Williams.

Some of the most intriguing work was directly on fandom, and showed both how fan studies  continues to evolve, and how Doctor Who, with its great longevity and multiple iterations of fandom, presents a particular challenge to scholars. Paul Booth presented some of his fascinating ethnographic work on fandom’s alleged “generation gap,” which showed that while older and newer fans perceive projections of themselves from the other, neither group seems to actually hold any of the feelings ascribed to them by the other. Rebecca Williams used Giddens’ concept of “ontological security” to trace fan reactions to the departures of David Tennant and Matt Smith on social media. Leslie Manning showed how the Doctor is an advocate for greater neurodiversity, and how important he is for fans on the autism spectrum. Brigid Cherry profiled the women of the Doctor Who knitting and crochet community, who celebrate and share their fandom with handmade crafts and techniques.

The conference wrapped up with a roundtable discussion of the possibility of “Doctor Who studies.” While it’s inconclusive whether such a subfield already exists as such, and the cautionary lessons from “Buffy studies” are still fresh, it’s clear that now is the golden age for scholarly work on Doctor Who. Two new anthologies, from two publishers, were launched at this conference alone, joining the burgeoning list of work already published since the relaunch. As with the series and its paratexts, there is now clearly more work on Doctor Who than one can keep up with. However, as with any field centered on a particular media text or author, it’s far from certain how much work is really relevant beyond Doctor Who fandom. How would a named “Doctor Who studies” relate to people not especially interested in Doctor Who, and to larger questions and approaches from parent fields (not only media studies)? What is gained by this subdivision? Facing the other direction, towards fandom, how will scholars productively engage their academic approaches to Doctor Who with the increasingly sophisticated, always relevant, and fiercely creative work of non-academic fans? My experiences “crossing the streams” of Doctor Who academia and fandom have left me assured of the series’ cultural power, but concerned that we (i.e., academics) still haven’t quite figured out how to connect with fandom.

Still, this was an invigorating and thought-provoking conference that has widened my appreciation for Doctor Who and the scholarship it has inspired. Regardless of what happens after Matt Smith regenerates into Peter Capaldi, Doctor Who will continue, fans will continue to love it, and scholars will continue to study it. But, as with any cultural phenomenon, the question of how it all matters is still, thankfully, open.

“We did good, didn’t we?”
“Perhaps. Time will tell. It always does.”
Ace and The Doctor, “Remembrance of the Daleks” (1988)

This post is part of an ongoing partnership between the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Antenna: Responses to Media & Culture and the Society for Cinema & Media Studies’ Cinema Journal.