I think some of us are in mourning.  The Doctor as an asexual character is officially dead.  In “The Crimson Horror”, the Doctor first flirted with (/at) Jenny, then grabbed her, dipped her, and forced her into a kiss.  When slapped by her afterwards, he made a joke about it, didn’t apologize, then proceeded to sexually objectify her as she defended herself in a fight.  It was all played for comedic effect.

This is not my Doctor.  This is not the Doctor of the last 50 years.

Though this isn’t the first time a non-consensual kiss has appeared in modern Doctor Who, it is the most aggressive and only instance of predatory behavior on the part of the Doctor.

Its made me realize how lucky we’ve been all these years.  One of the best parts of the Doctor has always been that he isn’t predatory.  He has many friends, but he never has ulterior sexual motives.  Steven Moffat’s production team have decided that that’s OK now.  Its goofy, its wacky; its the Doctor.

(I’ve vlogged about the episode here.)

Previously on Domesticating the Doctor, we looked at our hero’s distaste of the domestic sphere throughout the Classic Years (with a brief holiday from it when he was Jon Pertwee), we looked at the three Mother-in-Law characters from the RTD era and how this new, rebooted version of our hero coped with jam, Christmas dinner and housing estates, we delved back into pre-war Britain with a very human Doctor, we poked holes in his new Moffat era family with Marrying the Ponds and then examined the final act of that relationship in Divorcing the Ponds.

As it turned out, the new companion of 2012 provided me with a brilliant coda to my Domesticating the Doctor series – a girl with an egg-whisk in her belt who moonlights as a Victorian governess!

Thank you, Mr Moffat. I’ll take it from here.

To me, the most baffling element of Asylum of the Daleks was not what the hell Jenna-Louise Coleman was actually doing there, five months before we expected her to arrive. It was: how does the Doctor know that you require fresh eggs and milk to make a soufflé?

I mean, seriously. It took him nine hundred and one years to get the hang of jam.

Coleman’s character of Oswin Oswald is explicitly domestic, from the cozy home she has set up for herself in the belly of a crashed spaceship to the egg whisk she wears in the utility belt of her little red dress. She even dictates letters home to her Mum. It’s all a cruel trick, of course, but it’s a clever one. Oswin is hanging on to the precious shreds of her remembered humanity, and the burnt birthday soufflé that was ‘too perfect to live’ is a part of that illusion.

Domesticity – the place we live, the everyday tasks that heroic stories tend to ignore – is an important aspect of humanity. We don’t all have to be 1950’s housewives who make perfect soufflés, or even switch on an oven, but to me the most interesting science fiction (and indeed the most interesting history) is that which explores how people actually go about their daily lives.

Oswin is living inside a Dalek shell. She’s not a human any more. But her plaintive cry of “Eggs, eggs, exterminate,” shows how much it hurts that she’s not human. The memory of ordinary things is all that is keeping her going. So her fantasy is a Robinson Crusoe wonderland in which her isolation becomes a safe haven with a comfy couch, endless wi-fi, her favourite music, and occasional attempts at baking.

It’s Amy who dubs her ‘Souffle Girl,’ a name that the Doctor later remembers and associates with Oswin. It’s the soufflé-burning aspect of her personality that fans have grasped more readily than, say, her love of the opera Carmen. The idea of a Dalek who wants to cook a soufflé is absurd, but there’s a sadness behind the many egg whisk jokes that have whirled around the internet since Oswin’s debut.

All she wanted was to be herself again, and to survive. Instead, our job is to remember her…

But wait, there’s more!

In The Snowmen we are introduced to Clara, a bright-as-a-button Victorian governess (and occasional Cockney barmaid) who is smart and educated enough to blag her way into a refined job in a fancy house, but drops into her commoner accent when under stress.

The governess is an absolute embodiment of Victorian domesticity, and in a story which subverts other narrative expectations of the Victorian era, especially when it comes to conventional marriage and the truth behind the iconic Sherlock Holmes stories, Clara is pretty much the perfect governess.

Many fans compared her turn in this story to Mary Poppins, who belongs to the later Edwardian era but certainly has much in common with the arch, unflappable Clara. As “Miss Montague,” she spouts nonsense when it suits her, but with great conviction, and she demonstrates her knowledge of how Victorian households are supposed to work down to the finest detail, only to stomp on those rules.

(also it’s worth noting this story includes two examples of the governess trope: the good governess who is the heroine, and the evil stern governess who tortures little children and throws people off clouds)

Clara protects the children, her prime job, but otherwise has little deep attachment to the social conventions of her time. She isn’t especially shocked by Vastra and Jenny’s relationship, she loses patience with keeping up the facade in front of her stuffy employer, and she answers the call of adventure over and over, almost before that call is voiced.

And oh yes, she leaps upon carriages, climbs magical staircases in the clouds, and believes everything she sees no matter how wondrous it appears. Add to this the “serious silliness” she speaks to children, and if Clara was not female, it wouldn’t be Mary Poppins we would be comparing her to, it would be the Doctor himself.

Much discussion has happened around the Doctor in The Snowmen, and how he spends a large part of the story not acting like the Doctor – refusing the call to adventure, batting away potential companions, sulking, insulting his friends and oh yes, can we talk about the fact that he has parked the TARDIS in a semi-permanent position?

We often see the action hero who deals with grief and tragedy by walking stoically off into the distance. Since flitting about randomly is the Doctor’s usual response to everything, the fact that he mourns Amy and Rory’s loss by settling down is rather telling. He has even redecorated his TARDIS interior, in a grand clean sweep that many would recognise as a classic post-breakup gesture.

More than anything, in The Snowmen, we see how hard it is for the Doctor to avoid his own narrative. He can’t travel in the TARDIS because she always takes him where he needs to go and that means new adventures, new friends, drama and peril. So he stays in this place where he has friends already, but the kind of friends he can trust to take care of business in his retirement, friends who take no for an answer when he continually refuses to help people, and in the case of Strax in particular, friends who require no emotional energy from him.

You get the impression that Clara isn’t the first companion to have auditioned her way into his path over however many weeks-months-years the Doctor has been parked above Victorian London. Plucky young women may well have been hurling themselves at him on a regular basis, for him to be so quick about calling for the Memory Worm.

Madam Vastra works here as a kind of anti social secretary, standing between these plucky youngsters and the Doctor as a final barrier to keep him from the narrative that is trying to batter at his stubborn shield. Clara is only able to break through by choosing a word that has significance to the Doctor, seemingly by coincidence. “Pond.”

(On rewatching I might add, we don’t see her choose that word personally which allows for the charming possibility that Vastra herself is on Clara’s side)

Domesticity in The Snowmen is particularly represented by Madam Vastra and Jenny, who are now formally married in a time when lesbians were presumed by law to not even exist. While this is largely played for humour in the story, particularly in Vastra’s unabashed acknowledgement of her wife (on the grounds presumably that the stuffy Victorians also have to deal with the fact that she’s a green lizard woman so why not get it all over with at once), it also represents significant character development for Jenny.

No longer the maid sleeping with her mistress, Jenny now dresses differently as the lady of the house – and this is not only one in the eye for Victorian society because she and Vastra are both women, but also because of the generally deplorable sexual vulnerability of women in domestic service at that time. Maids were often seduced by the men of the houses in which they worked, and were far more likely to end up pregnant, unemployed and homeless than married to their former employer. Jenny’s done pretty well for herself – and it’s one more sign of Vastra’s flouting of conventions.

This brings us back to Clara, who exists both inside the domestic circle and yet has the strange, unexplained freedom to fling it off like a coat any time she wishes. Her snog of the Doctor in the corridor of her employer’s house is deeply inappropriate, not only because she is supposedly a young unmarried woman of that era, and because she barely knows him, but especially because of her position in that house – they make a joke of the Doctor being her gentleman friend, and his abashed insistence that they were kissing rather than fighting a monster (not realising apparently that this is a pretty scandalous thing to admit to in this era) but a real domestic servant would be turned out on the street for such behaviour.

I don’t think this anachronistic feeling is remotely accidental. Whenever Clara openly shucks off the governess voice or anything else that goes along with that job, it feels like she is stepping out of a role. Part of the reason we compare her to Mary Poppins is because like that famous nanny, she doesn’t quite fit into the world we see her in. She behaves as if she is outside it all, beyond the constraints of the era.

This adds to the Doctor’s general discombobulation about Clara. He can’t predict what she will do, which alarms and intrigues him. Part of it is that she is not behaving in the way that Victorian ladies (or indeed lower lass women) do, but there’s also that pesky domestic goddess aspect to her which makes her even more of an enigma – ladies with domestic concerns are difficult for him to get the hang of at the best of times.

But Clara makes no sense to him regardless of whether she is acting within or without the bounds of her society. When she first sees inside the TARDIS, her first words are opposite to what we’ve always heard before – it’s smaller on the outside. More to the point, she’s the first person to respond almost instantly with practical questions about how life on board the TARDIS works.

Is there a kitchen? It’s actually an important question. Apart from the food machine in the early days, and Tegan and Turlough providing a massive tropical fruit plate in The Five Doctors, there’s been little examination of how the day to day functions are achieved within the TARDIS. It’s there in the books and audios – one of my favourite Doctor Who scenes of all times is at the end of the audio The Settling where Ace and Hex, recovering from the trauma of Cromwell’s battlefield, quietly make tea for each other, walking to the library to pick lemons from a tree that grows there because there isn’t any freshmilk in the fridge.

The juxtaposition of the domestic with the alien is one of the loveliest, cleverest things that Doctor Who does, and yet we so rarely see domesticity shown within the TARDIS herself. The new design in fact, was planned to be “less whimsical” than the previous version, and manages to be the starkest version of the console room since it was just a white room with roundels on the walls. Never mind a kitchen, there’s not even anywhere to sit down!

Rose had to take her washing home, presumably because she never found a laundry in the TARDIS. Amy and Rory weren’t allowed a double bed. But Clara, we are certain, would have made use of the damn kitchen if she had been given half a chance. If only the Doctor had remembered that crucial point about closing the TARDIS door when he has friends over…

Clara doesn’t just die in this story. She is snatched out of the one place that Doctor Who viewers are conditioned to believe is safe. The frozen monster who represents a far less cuddly version of the Victorian governess actually reaches right into the console room to grab her, and she ends up falling to her death.

Young ladies die a lot in Victorian novels. It’s a common literary trope. They also lie wanly on couches due to mysterious illnesses. But even as Clara lies wanly on the table about to expire, she is not behaving like a traditional Victorian miss. There’s something strange about her, and we don’t get to know what it is…

The most interesting thing about Clara as a companion is that she has died twice and we haven’t even met her yet. Two highly successful auditions, and the Doctor was willing to hand over the TARDIS key to her before the second adventure was even over. But without wanting to spoil anyone, there was a tidbit in the most recent Doctor Who Magazine which suggested modern Clara’s job at least will make her eligible for a further essay in this series… no word yet on her baking skills, but we can only hope she gets to wield an egg whisk at some point in the next couple of years.

Of course, with one story in the impending season named Journey To The Centre of the TARDIS, it looks like we are going to get to poke around the latest version of the Doctor’s home, just in time for the 50th anniversary. Does this mean that Clara will be the first companion since the 1980’s to get her own room in the TARDIS that we will actually see?

I’m laying a bet now on her preferred decorating style: vintage.

Actor Janet Fielding as Tegan Jovanka, in a screencap from the 1982 serial "Black Orchid". In this closeup, she is wearing a flapper-style green headband ornamented with a pink rose, and is laughing at the camera.

Mouth on Legs

Tegan Jovanka, everyone’s favourite trainee Australian flight attendant, is one of the Doctor’s longest-serving companions. She even eclipses the legendary Sarah Jane Smith, though only by a couple of weeks (and SJS was in more episodes). She’s pretty inarguably the Fifth Doctor’s companion, serving in all but two of Peter Davison’s televised serials. But you’d never know it from fandom. What is it with Tegan? Why is her sarcasm “stroppy” and “mean-spirited”, while Donna Noble’s is endearingly sassy? Why is her ambivalence about adventuring across time and space versus forging her domestic, Earthbound life–her real life–”whiny”, when Amy Pond’s very similar arc is portrayed much more sympathetically? I think it’s time to take another look at Our Tegan, the Classic Who companion who most clearly anticipates the New Who companion, and this time see the seeds she planted.

I hate those transmat things. I’d be afraid of coming out puréed.

Me, I had a soft spot for Tegan from early on. In “Castrovalva”, the newly-regenerated Fifth Doctor is looking for a Zero Room–a place, he says, that’s cut off from the rest of the universe. Tegan snarks that if she’d known that’s what he wanted, she would have suggested her native Brisbane. And lo, my little heart went “pwing!” What kid raised in suburban or rural environs–convinced that their parents had deliberately chosen the least interesting place on earth for them to grow up in– wouldn’t feel a twinge of empathy?

I love moments in Who that ground the fantastic in the earthy, that reach right past the high concept of the show to reveal how real people might react in such bizarre circumstances. I love the moment in “Forest of the Dead” where Donna, bewildered at the revelation that her life is a Matrix-like simulation, snaps, “But… I’ve been dieting!” All her discipline and willpower, and she could have had the chocolate cake anyway. Who wouldn’t feel frustrated? I love Martha worrying, in “The Shakespeare Code” whether Elizabethan London is a safe place for a black woman, and I’m annoyed that the Doctor brushes off her valid concerns.

And Tegan, with her shots at Brisbane and her entirely understandable wariness of this strange new world she finds herself in; Tegan, who never travels with a fellow human aboard the TARDIS; Tegan provides that essential grounded viewpoint.

Tegan’s character establishes itself early, and is remarkably consistent: she’ll speak her mind even when her voice shakes, she tries to be self-reliant to the extent that she won’t always ask for help when she needs it; she hides her fear and vulnerability behind a facade of snark and bravado. In short, she has a lot in common with one of the best-liked recent companions: Donna Noble. The two redheads are characterized by their fiery natures–both have tempers, neither is willing to take the Doctor’s crap, and both almost delight in puncturing his self-importance. Both remind the Doctor of the impact his plans have on the ordinary people caught up in them; indeed, they each almost consciously take on the mantle of the Doctor’s conscience. Both women were abducted aboard the TARDIS for their first experience(s) with the Doctor; leave when the Doctor finally returns them to their own time; and, later, dissatisfied with what had, pre-Doctor, been perfectly satisfying lives, chose to return for more adventures. [1]

So why is Donna beloved while Tegan, generally, isn’t? Is it the quarter century that elapsed between the two? I think that’s a large part of it. Nyssa and Tegan are both good examples of some of the problems with the way womens’ roles were written in the early Eighties: one was sweet and childlike; the other, adult but shrewish, and guess which one was allowed to be intelligent? Nor was the series at the time very interested in the companion’s story. We learned much more about Donna’s past, her family, and her character in one year than we did about Tegan in three, and the depth of Donna’s character helped make her sympathetic. So where Donna was a well-rounded character with flaws and strengths, Tegan, despite her much long tenure in the TARDIS, is much more of a cipher.

I happen to think that human lives are just as valuable as yours!

Tegan’s original character brief is… kind of offensive.

Tegan is twenty-one, an attractive and intelligent Australian trainee air stewardess, whose brash confidence in her own abilities actually conceals inner insecurity, a state of affairs that becomes clear in moments of stress. On her way to her first real flight she accidentally blunders into the TARDIS and thus finds herself being inadvertantly [sic] abducted by the Doctor. Characteristically her inner bewilderment at the new situation in which she finds herself causes her to assume an attitude of overweening self-assertion, and she begins to take charge of the Doctor and Adric. During the course of three stories, Tegan’s superficial self-assurance will build until it becomes a real problem for the other two occupants of the TARDIS, and it will need drastic action on the part of the Doctor to put things to rights and show her the error of her ways. She may or may not continue with the Doctor thereafter.
(“Doctor Who – The Eighties” by David J Howe, Mark Stammers, Stephen James Walker; p.13.)

Oh, joy: the Uppity Woman Who Receives Her Well-Deserved Chastisement At The Hands Of A Wiser Man. (See, also, a remarkable fraction of the plots involving Lois Lane in mid-century Superman.) Way to smack down any female character who thinks herself a man’s equal!

But what’s remarkable here is how little of Tegan’s planned arc made it into production. Tegan had her flaws–rashness, a short temper, a bad habit of lashing out at people when she felt overwhelmed or frightened–but I think it’s very hard to argue that she was arrogant, much less that she “took charge” with “overweening self-assertion”. She makes her opinions known, but defers to the Doctor and Nyssa, less brash than she but more experienced. Certainly her comeuppance, as planned in her character brief, never happens.

Long shot showing Tegan exiting the TARDIS. Screencap from the 1981 serial "Castrovalva".

Tegan gets away from the bitch in the character brief as early as her debut story, “Logopolis”. We meet her as she heads to Heathrow to begin her new job as a flight attendant, a job she is clearly looking forward to. She seems eager for independence, for a chance to prove herself in–yes–a man’s world. Tegan herself identifies her desire to fix her own car as feminist self-reliance.

Even when Tegan stumbles into the TARDIS and gets lost, she manages to maintain much better composure than might be expected of a human confronted with the overwhelming implications of a dimensionally transcendent alien spacetimeship. (Remember that, unlike nearly every other companion, Tegan doesn’t have the Doctor as a tour guide.) She is clearly terrified, but doesn’t let her fear disable her. She knows that she is in some sort of craft: she realizes that the console room is the equivalent of a cockpit; she tries to use the communication devices at the console; she reasons that there must be a pilot aboard, and asks to see that person. She, in short, displays a rather astonishing degree of analytical ability and sang-froid–and that’s just in her first serial.

Peter Davison’s been heard to say that he thought Nyssa was the companion best suited for his Doctor, but I think he’s wrong. Nyssa may have been the one the Fifth Doctor got along with, but Tegan–spiky, ornery, brave Tegan–was the one he needed. It’s Tegan who wants to know why the Doctor can’t go back and save Adric (“Time-Flight”), in a scene that–as the companion confronts the Doctor over a heartbreaking failure to save a fellow companion–is right at home in the new series:

Tegan: Aren’t you forgetting something important, Doctor? Adric is dead.

Amy: Save him. You save everyone. You always do. That’s what you do.
The Doctor: Not always. I’m sorry.
Amy: Then what is the point of you?

It’s Tegan who who commits to freeing the Frontios colonists when the Doctor is trying to butter up the villain (“Frontios”), Tegan who’s willing to throw knives at people in the Doctor’s defense (“The King’s Demons”). And, finally, it’s Tegan whose departure forces the Doctor to admit that his hands are bloody. The Doctor doesn’t last long without her–two serials after she leaves, he regenerates.

Tegan vs. Eurocentrism

"McArthur's Universal Corrective Map of the World": a 1979 world map by an Australian cartographer that is oriented so that it has South at the top and Australia in the center.

Beneath its glossy science fiction trappings, Doctor Who is a direct descendent of Victoriana: specifically, the Victorian traditions of the gentleman adventurer and the gentleman inventor. This is not an era known for its transgression or its diversity, and Who has struggled to rise above the colonialist subtext of “nice white man from advanced civilisation arrives to save backwards civilisations from themselves”.

As our own Courtney Stoker has put it, Doctor Who is:

… not a particularly progressive, transgressive, or subversive show. It’s just a show about a White dude who wields all the power and paternalism of a British imperialist force…

John Nathan-Turner’s reasons for creating an Australian companion probably didn’t include venturing outside Doctor Who‘s comfort zone or introducing a non-European perspective–accounts of the era suggest that he was mostly interested in selling the show to Australia.

But Tegan does bring a non-British, non-European perspective to the TARDIS, maybe most notably in “Four to Doomsday” when she can communicate with Kurkutji, a temporally displaced Aboriginal Australian, and the Doctor can’t.[2] The scene has some problematic elements that imply a screenwriter who seems not to have thought much about either linguistics or Australia’s diversity of languages, including the odd implication that Kurkutji’s language hasn’t changed over 40,000 years (by contrast, a mere 10,000 years separates English from Proto-Indo-European), and the extraordinary coincidence that Tegan happens to know that one particular language among the hundreds native to Australia. But Tegan’s achievement remains: she can do something that the Doctor cannot, and it is extremely important to the story.

It’s tempting to wonder how much of her pointed refusal to be impressed by the Doctor is that, from her perspective, he may well be the Ultimate Pom: representative of an allegedly superior culture who condescends to hang around hers.

It’s stopped being fun, Doctor

What does Tegan want? Does she want to stay with the Doctor or leave? Certainly she’s one of the companions most ambivalent about traveling with the Doctor. But her story is nearly unique among the companions: she stumbled aboard the TARDIS without meaning to, and the Doctor’s attempts to take her home repeatedly failed. She never asked for adventure; it was thrust upon her.

But how do you reconcile a life of adventure with a mundane Earthbound life? This is a major theme of the new series and its spinoffs, but it’s in Tegan’s story that we see it first broached.  The confident young woman we met in “Logopolis”, looking forward to her new job, has her horizons so shattered by her adventures that (per “Arc of Infinity”) she doesn’t last three months as a flight attendant.

So she returns to a life of adventure. This time she wants to be there. She seems happier, now that it’s her choice; she’s more of a participant than a bystander. She is increasingly concerned with the lot of the little people caught up in the mayhem that surrounds the Doctor, and is increasingly determined to give them a voice.

And things start going wrong. Gradually, Tegan realizes that the exhilaration of adventure is not worth the psychic toll it’s taking on her. She’s seen too much. She’s… outgrown him.

So she makes the excruciating choice–the only possible choice–and leaves. On her own terms, with her head held high. Brava.

There’s a woman in Australia… fighting for Aboriginal rights

I’m of the opinion that Who has, ultimately, just one lesson for us to learn, over and over again: we are the same.

Tegan learned it.

[1] It’s pretty common in the new series for companions to alternate time with the Doctor and time at home: Rose, Mickey, Martha, Donna, River, Amy, and Rory have all had adventures, left the Doctor, and then come back to have more adventures. But it was vanishingly rare in the classic series; I think Tegan’s the only example. (Sarah Jane didn’t come back until the new series.)
[2] Interestingly, this translation oddity didn’t make any sense at the time (I think it’s the first time the translation magic didn’t work) but does fit in remarkably well with current Who canon, which holds that the TARDIS can’t translate exceptionally old languages. (“The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit”)

A cosplayer wears a blue TARDIS dress, opening the bottom of the dress to reveal a beautiful, detailed, hand-painted TARDIS interior on the fabric.

Unsurprisingly, but sadly, the cosplayer faced a bunch of fat-shaming on Facebook where the pictures were uploaded:

Various Facebook comments with large words that read "THIS IS BULLSHIT." The comments: Johnny Hinsley: Shes bigger on the outside; Andros P Parker: Shes bigger on the outside; Jeffrey Cosgrove: Would be better if she wasn't fat; Daniel R. Celhay: She's almost the same size as the real tardis!; Jon Kelsey: So it's big on the outside too lol; Daniel Marquis: Cool, but not particularly attractive. How about a sexy dress inspired by The TARDIS?

As stfuconservatives on Tumblr pointed out: “I think my favorite fat-shamer here is Daniel Marquis, saying ‘Cool but not particularly attractive.’ Remember, ladies: your pursuits are meaningless if you can’t express them in a way that’s sexually pleasing to all men.”

Over at Wired, they have a great article on women in film called “Leia Is Not Enough: Star Wars and the Woman Problem in Hollywood“:

Criticisms about representations of gender (or race and other diversity) are often countered in fandom by sociological or scientific analyses attempting to explain why the inequality happens according to the internal logic of the fictional world. As though there is any real reason that anything happens in a story except that someone chose to write it that way.

Fiction is not Darwinian: It contains no impartial process of evolution that dispassionately produces the events of a fictional universe. Fiction is miraculously, fundamentally Creationist. When we make worlds, we become gods. And gods are responsible for the things they create, particularly when they create them in their own image.

(TW: rape) At Kotaku, there’s a piece by a female gamer about why she will no longer say “I raped you” to a fellow gamer:

The power dynamic was already set in place before the match even started, and it wasn’t in my favor. Trash talk makes it obvious that the implicit understanding of the language of dominion isn’t just sexualized. It’s gendered. That power struggle is culturally understood to be a man versus woman thing, even though rape doesn’t just happen to women. Most of the slurs of choice point toward the same thing. Someone is a bitch, they’re a faggot—feminine—and if you beat someone, then you raped them. The imagery there for most of us will be the same: a man physically assaulting a woman, not the other way around.

That’s the tragic thing about rape and its surrounding culture. It’s not just that it’s so potent as an image of power dynamics, but that that potency also has the ability to pull even survivors like me into using it against others. It’s not just what I did in Gears of War. There’s plenty of other things that I’ve been guilty of in the past, before I started giving a damn—like slut shaming, like thinking that a woman could ‘ask for it.’

I can’t help but ask myself, then. Who really won that match? Me, who completed the objectives successfully? Or them, who, despite as hard as I tried, made me complicit in the rape culture that has taken so much away from me?

Would you like some more cosplay? You know you would.

A cosplayer dressed as a transformer stylized as the TARDIS at Toronto ComicCon.

A black man with fabulous short spiky hair cosplays as the 11th Doctor at a con.

Source for transformer and source for 11th Doctor.

And what about you? What have you been writing and reading lately?

The Christmas decorations are still up, we’ve only just started eating the pudding (if I’d known it only took 3 minutes in the microwave I might have cooked it on Christmas Day) but the festive season is pretty much over in our house. Time to chew over the 2012 Doctor Who episodes (Series Pond & the Christmas Special) with a couple of new installments of DOMESTICATING THE DOCTOR.

Previously on Domesticating the Doctor, we looked at our hero’s distaste of the domestic sphere throughout the Classic Years (with a brief holiday from it when he was Jon Pertwee), we looked at the three Mother-in-Law characters from the RTD era and how this new, rebooted version of our hero coped with jam, Christmas dinner and housing estates, we delved back into pre-war Britain with a very human Doctor, and finally we poked holes in his new Moffat era family with Marrying the Ponds.

Before I get to the 2012 episodes, I wanted to touch briefly on the Night and the Doctor shorts, which were released last year as part of the Season 6 box set, but which I personally failed to watch until somewhere around the beginning of Season 7. These little sketches not only answer some rather intriguing questions about the actual timey wimey physics involved in the Doctor’s marriage to River Song, but also expands on his relationship with Amy, cementing it once and for all as being far closer to a familial connection than anything else.

This Doctor doesn’t get why married people should want to share a bed, but is in his element when talking about his best friend’s childhood – children make sense to him in a way that grown ups don’t, and he seems far less threatened by their domesticity. If this wasn’t fully clear from The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe (which probably deserves a post of its own, to be honest) in which the Doctor upcycles a house to be a child’s paradise but sneers at the functional adult rooms, it should certainly be clear from the scene in which he shows Amy the power he can have over her childhood and her memories, using only a theoretical ice-cream.

Also, as suspected, his marriage to River is full of gun battles, glamorous evening dresses, and nothing remotely domestic. Romance all the way, their style, but they’re not picking a dinner service together.

Another series of short sketches appeared just before the launch of Series 7a (or as Moffat referred to it, Series Pond): Pond Life laid out the theme of the first half of this season by showing how Amy and Rory’s grown up life is affected by the Doctor flitting in and out – there’s an Ood packing their lunches, and a Time Lord bursting in on them in the bedroom (again). It’s all funny and entertaining, but a little bit wrong.

Why exactly is this Doctor trying to hard to keep Amy and Rory? He’s never done it before. Sure, it could be because he imprinted on Amy during his post-regeneration trauma [the first face I saw] but I’m not convinced that’s enough of an explanation. It has nothing to do with River, either, who doesn’t figure in Pond Life or most of this season.

The companions are growing up, and domesticity slowly swallows them whole and then spits them out again – the Doctor turns up one day to discover that they’re not home, something is wrong, and he missed the moment to fix it, even supposing he could have done so in the first place.

Oddly, this matters to him, in a way no previous Doctor would even have blinked at. Is this the first sign that the Doctor is getting old?

Asylum of the Daleks was a shock to the system for many fans – not because of the big movie style drama and action of the piece, but because Amy and Rory’s marriage was on the rocks and at the point of divorce, suddenly and without warning.

And yes, it was dealt with in a rather shallow, too-quick kind of way in the story, but the tension between them was more than a ‘gasp, what has Moffat done’ season opener. The actual point of the relationship breakdown and the Dalek-inspired reunion was made quite clear by Amy who tells the Doctor firmly that this isn’t something he can fix “like you fix your bow-tie.”

I get very defensive of Amy, who seems to be a target for such a massive weight of criticism (some of it very gendered and problematic) and I was particularly concerned to see how many people watched the thirty second argument/making up of Amy and Rory Pond, and leaped to the conclusion that Amy was entirely at fault, and had broken up their marriage without having a single conversation with Rory about why she wanted to end it.

I didn’t get that at all from their exchange. In fact, when she raises her inability to have children (and we don’t actually know whether this is a physical or psychological barrier), he replies “I know” which implied to me that this was a conversation they had gone over more than once. The big difference in this particular version of that conversation was not Amy’s revelation (to the audience) about her motivation for kicking him out of the house, but Rory’s own inadvertent revelation that he believes his love for her is BETTER than her love for him – that he has always assumed this is an intrinsic fact of their relationship.

And, whoa.

I don’t actually think we should be critiquing what goes on in a fictional marriage any more than we should throw stones about real relationships, but I do think it’s worth noting that Rory (who can often do no wrong in fandom eyes) does not cover himself in glory in this exchange. Not only does he bring up the ‘waited 2000 years for you’ sacrifice to score points in a fight, but his lack of confidence in Amy’s love (which he probably always thought of as humble and self-sacrificing) is a form of terrible arrogance – as if he has the competitive moral high ground in their love story. This to me is just as problematic as Amy’s own arrogance in making the choice to ‘let him go’ so he can have imaginary children with some other person.

Note, I adore both Rory and Amy. I think they are both cute as buttons. I also think that they are not in their best emotional shape in their early twenties, at least partly thanks to the timey-wimey shenanigans they have gone through. And it’s important to recognise that there are faults on both sides here – they both have trust issues and forgiveness issues and have to get over all of that to be together. The strength of Series Pond is very much that it shows the progression from a relationship that is not-cooked-yet to a mature marriage that we can believe lasting for the rest of their lives.

If Amy and Rory had drifted happily towards their final story without some sign of bumps in the road, especially after the trauma at Demon’s Run (and the emotional ramifications that we never did see dealt with on screen – no wonder they went off the rails as soon as the cameras turned their backs) then their Happy Ever After would have felt far less realistic.

People do stupid things in their early twenties. If they’re lucky, the world doesn’t end.

While we’re on Asylum of the Daleks, there was one element I did want to critique: I love Amy’s cranky Scottish fury at the world, but the slapping in this episode felt wrong. It was just as inappropriate here as in the Time and Space sketches a couple of years ago – Moffat’s writing has always shown a clear influence from old Hollywood banter movies, and this is usually a good thing (because, BANTER) but hitting within marriage isn’t funny in the 21st century, and it doesn’t make a lot of a difference that it’s the woman doing it.

At least when Lynda slapped Spike in Press Gang, he slapped her back. The same went for Starbuck and Apollo in Battlestar Galactica. In both instances it was shown as an example of a couple who see each other as equals regardless of gender – but Rory would never slap Amy in a million years (and no one would accept him doing so in Doctor Who) and it feels deeply uncomfortable to see that double standard played for laughs.

While I agree Doctor Who is not a children’s programme any more, I think it’s important to remember how many children do watch it, and there are some things that are irresponsible to make light of. Comedy marital violence is up there with rape jokes as things we don’t need to see in our escapist TV any more.

Ahem (steps off soap box)

So the marriage was patched up, and continued stronger than before, but the Doctor kept returning, colliding happily into the Ponds’ domestic normality on an irregular and unpredictable schedule, usually without so much as a by-your-leave.

This was certainly a fresh companion interaction, and one with great source for humour. Thanks to the clever writing of both Moffat and Chris Chibnall (seriously, who would have thought it) we got to see Amy and Rory grow into themselves as adults, falling in and out of the TARDIS in between domestic chores such as changing lightbulbs…

Dinosaurs on a Spaceship contained many glories, but adding Rory’s Dad to the canon of, well, companion parents (I guess I can’t call them Mothers-in-Law anymore) was a master stroke. Brian Williams embodies domesticity, a homebody who prides himself on a quiet masculine competence.

Meeting Brian, we understand more about Rory than we ever have before. It’s clear that his son being a nurse makes almost as little sense to Brian as does travelling among the stars, but also that they are deeply similar in the ways that matter – I loved the line especially about how Rory has been picking up space-tech with medical/first aid applications on his journeys, just as his Dad always has practical things in his own pockets.

Also, Brian never actually refers to the TARDIS as a shed (if you’ve never listened to the Lucie Miller/8th Doctor audios then her speech about it being a shed is pretty spectacular) but you just know from his final scene sitting on the doorstep of the TARDIS eating his sandwiches and watching the universe go past that he thinks of it as the ‘best shed ever.’

Meanwhile, Amy the action hero is getting better and better at the TARDIS adventures (in this story she takes on the role of the Doctor, naming Nefertiti and Riddell as her companions) and yet struggles to settle down in her everyday life. Even the Doctor, who usually does not pay attention to such things, notices that she keeps switching jobs (I was trying so hard not to be judgy, but TERRIBLY RELIEVED she was not a fashion model for ever) and seems mildly concerned about it.

Is it his fault that Amy can’t find an occupation she is satisfied with in the real world? Well, yes. Her short attention-span and trust issues are almost entirely down to him – especially when you take into account that the crack in her wall was at least partly his fault too.

Never mind, she still has some growing up to do.

It was The Power of Three where domesticity and the Doctor truly came back into focus, in something akin to a duel to the death. Guess who won, almost by default?

Here’s a clue: it wasn’t domesticity.

The plot resolution may have been a bit rubbish (as young Amelia might say), but the Power of Three was a wonderful penultimate adventure for Rory and Amy largely because it wasn’t a real adventure at all – it was a glimpse at how fractured their domestic life had become, with the Doctor’s many intrusions into it. They even got to experience (along with the audience) what it would be like if the Doctor stayed with them for a while instead of the other way around.

Irritating, mostly.

During the Year of the Slow Invasion, Rory and Amy made the decision to stop running away with the Doctor. It’s a great decision for them. It allows them to commit to work and friends and their real life in a way that they never have before.

Frankly, I was so convinced by the progression of this narrative, from the final mmadcap antics including That Western Episode and OMG Zygons in the middle of their anniversary party, to the Doctor agonisingly bouncing off the walls (and the Wii) when forced to stay in one place, and their evident happiness in being able to ‘be’ in one place and time long term, that I was genuinely shocked when Brian pointed out that Amy and Rory had in fact been fooling themselves the whole time, and loved the Doctor best.

It was necessary to the story arc, but didn’t feel natural to me. I wanted them to stay and have their nice ordinary life, because that’s what the successful companions *get* when they leave the TARDIS.

Of course, that is what they got in the end, but not by choice.

One of the most frustrating aspect of New Who for me, especially in the RTD era, is the idea that running around in the TARDIS is the sort of thing no one would ever want to stop doing, except under very dramatic circumstances – even Martha and Mickey, the two companions who did finish it on their own terms, were both presented as doing so largely because they were needed with their families rather than because travelling no longer appealed (and in both cases there’s also the sad but clear implication that they both feel they’re not as important to the Doctor as Rose – that neither of them feel like they really count as a companion).

I am not saying that we should have a companion who spends her whole journey through Oz bitching about wanting to get back to Kansas, but why shouldn’t a companion simply grow out of it, or decide that it’s time to stop wandering, or find a better option, without it having to be a tragedy of epic proportions? There must be a happy medium somewhere between Doomsday and sending Dodo to the country…

Travel is fun and awesome and exciting, but home is quite nice too. There’s something to be said for the comfort and reliability of domesticity. After the ‘there’s no place like TARDIS’ attitude of the RTD era, I was quite excited that this last run of Amy and Rory’s epic adventure wase presenting the idea that yes, you could just grow up and leave the TARDIS while you were all still friends, without it having to be a Big Deal. You could leave the TARDIS (more than once) and still keep in touch with the Doctor…

But of course, this is a drama series. So, drama. And instead of the quite natural domestic end to Amy and Rory’s travels which maybe should have happened in The Power of Three, we got The Angels Take Manhattan which forced the Ponds and the Doctor apart forever.

What I liked best about The Angels Take Manhattan was the 1930’s style Hollywood romantic comedy banter, not just between the Doctor, Amy and Rory but also between the Doctor and River. More than any previous story this is the one that tries to define how the Doctor and River’s marriage works, and indeed what Amy and Rory’s marriage has become. It’s a love letter to the idea that being practical with another person, and finding a balance together over a number of years, is actually just as romantic as all that eyes-across-a-crowded-room business. This is refreshing considering how often romance in traditional drama is weighted towards the BEGINNING of a love story, rather than the comfortable middle.

This 30-something Amy and Rory have managed to find a comfortable middle of their relationship despite being back in the TARDIS – the impression from the scenes of them picnicking in New York is that they are no longer compromising their marriage for the Doctor despite living in his world – the three of them have a companionable friendship, but the boundaries marking out Amy and Rory as a unit are very clear.

River and the Doctor display far less of that easy comfort with each other. They are still figuring things out, and she displays some wariness and mistrust about their relationship. The line about not showing the damage and the bitterness about his eternal baby face is a rare glimpse of her feelings beneath the banter. I think it’s important that we see that this dizzy, weird marriage of theirs is battered in places. River and the Doctor are sweet together, but they also pretend to know each other a lot better than they actually do – and that’s so much more interesting than if they were flawlessly in love.

The Doctor seems to relish having a wife, which is an extraordinary shift for him. It’s half a joke, but he is not just going through the motions. River is his wife, and he accords her that status, even if his idea of what a wife is owes a little too much to old Thin Man movies.

More to the point, right after he has lost Amy and Rory and is devastated by that loss, the Doctor asks River to move in with him. But is he asking her as his wife or just another companion? Does she turn him down because she thinks it’s the only way to keep him interested? Or does she mean what she say that them living together would be disastrous?

The Doctor has to have known that by making that offer, he was changing what appears to be the definition of their marriage – having had a brief flirtation with the idea of the TARDIS being the home of one married couple, he’s now trying to repeat the experiment.

He’s not ready to let go of his family, not yet. But River won’t play ball.

Meanwhile, in the unfilmed coda published on the web in the wake of Amy and Rory’s departure, it is revealed that they adopted a son and ended up with the work-domesticity balance they were trying to achieve in the 21st century all along. Amy even finds her true calling, tapping away on a 1930’s typewriter.

All they needed to build a life was to be forcibly separated from the Doctor.

While the tragedy of Melody Pond’s abduction was never entirely resolved, the specific time and place in which Amy and Rory were ‘trapped’ also does not close the door on the possibility that they were able to be reunited with their child for at least some of her childhood, in the mysterious gap between her escape from the Silence and the space suit in the 1960’s, and her turning up to share their childhood in Leadworth in the 1990’s. For at least some of that time, she was in New York…

The latest issue of Doctor Who Magazine features a short Christmas comic, “Imaginary Enemies,” written by Scott Gray, featuring a vignette from Amy, Rory and Mels’ childhood in which they fight a monster on their way to the school nativity play. On the final page, in a farewell to the Ponds we see a series of snapshots from their life, both professional and domestic, through the 20th century in America. My favourite is the image of them building a snowman by the bridge in Central Park, with a bow-tie and a fez on it.

It looked for some time like the story of the Doctor and the Ponds was going to be a gentle drifting apart rather than a short, sharp divorce. But they just couldn’t quit him and more to the point, he couldn’t quit them.

Something big, yet again, had to separate them, and while the actual mechanism for this makes little sense (everyone and their robot dog have pointed out that all Amy and Rory have to do is step outside New York to meet up with the Doctor again) it is a convenient excuse to release the actors and the characters back into the world.

Between The Power of Three and The Angels Take Manhattan, the thousand-plus-year-old Doctor is more open to domesticity than he has ever been, even taking the cozy UNIT years into account.

Is this just a phase, or does it mean something very new for our hero?

Tune in next week for: Souffles in the TARDIS!

The mission statement of Verity! is to add more female voices to the Doctor Who podcasting community, and to chat with our friends. We hope to bring more reviews, meta-discussion, humour and wildly differing opinions to the table over this anniversary year, covering Classic as well as new Who.

Hope you give us a listen and enjoy!

The Voices:

• Deborah Stanish
• Erika Ensign
• Katrina Griffiths
• L.M. Myles
• Lynne M. Thomas
• Tansy Rayner Roberts

Email: veritypodcast@gmail.com
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Twitter: @VerityPodcast

Some time ago, Courtney asked me what kind of reaction I was trying to draw by doing femme Doctor cosplay (deliberately feminine variants of Doctor outfits), and I said that I wanted people to think about how clothing hobbles women. You simply can’t run in a corset, as Johanna Mead noted in her essay in the Hugo-winning Chicks Dig Time Lords (whose followup, Chicks Unravel Time, has contributions from Doctor Her’s own Courtney Stoker AND Tansy Rayner Roberts and is available now from quality booksellers everywhere), and as anyone who’s worn one will know. Part of the point of putting the Doctor in, say, a Fifties pencil skirt is to visually demonstrate that she would be ill-equipped to, as the Ninth Doctor said to Rose and then immediately demonstrated, run for her life. People wear what society expects them to wear, and if your society sticks you in a corset and bustle, then your society has assigned you the role of “monster food”, not “hero”.

That societal expectations constrain womens’ choices of roles is key to this story, which is fraught with female agency and the inevitable male pushback. Everyone’s favorite katana-wielding lesbian Victorian ninja detectives, Madame Vastra and Jenny Flint [1], are revealed as the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, but because they are women their achievements are taken from them and assigned to men. Dr. Simeon is quite upfront about that. Never mind that they are a lizard woman and a working-class woman in an openly romantic relationship, it’s their gender that makes their accomplishments unbelievable. Clara is whip-smart, but even she is trapped by a society that keeps trying to assign her a role–barmaid or governess, posh accent or Cockney, inquisitive or ladylike–and insists on a skirt with a bustle in either case.

The men we see are freer, but still constrained. Captain Latimer is cut off from an affectionate relationship with his children by his cultural belief that children are “not his area”. Dr. Simeon is a product, at least in part, of his society’s belief that men don’t have emotional lives and can do without human contact. Like the snow, society is revealed to be everyone mirroring everyone else, in a horrible feedback loop of perceived propriety.

And it’s the stifling propriety that’s the problem here. Captain Latimer is confronted with, in short order, a lizard woman with a human wife, a Sontaran, and an evil ice reincarnation of his former governess, but it’s the notion that Clara has a “gentleman friend” that he finds the most objectionable. [UPDATE: Very possibly for more than one reason, as several have noted in the comments. I'll freely admit that, as an ace, I often miss this sort of thing.] Governesses are supposed to be respectable. Women who have gentleman callers immediately cease to be respectable. When Dr. Simeon muses about Vastra’s “suspiciously… intimate… companion”, Vastra knows right away that he is attacking her respectability. Her defense (hilariously, she’s culturally savvy enough to know that 1) her respectability is an extremely important social aspect, and 2) marriage is a defense against impropriety) has no effect–she, and we, and Dr. Simeon all know that the allegations of impropriety are enough. “What’s wrong with Victorian values?” asks Dr. Simeon as the Doctor faces him down, and for once the Doctor (and the show) spell it out. The problem is that emotion is assigned to women and only to women, and women are devalued. The problem is that even a respectable Victorian woman is only an insinuation away from catastrophic social ruination. The problem is that privileged white men built themselves an echo chamber and used it to convince each other of their society’s enlightenment and advancement. The problem is that a society that has no room for dualities or human failings or even human emotions has no room for humans, only human-like simulacra made of ice.

Now that is some shit I’m delighted to see brought up in Doctor Who.

[1] SPIN-OFF! SPIN-OFF! Are you listening, Mr. Moffatt? I WOULD WATCH THE HELL OUT OF THAT SHOW.

Eight dolls, dressed as eight doctors.

When Tansy Rayner Roberts mentioned a few months ago that the Doctor Who Pattern Book included guidelines for doll costumes, I decided to snap up a copy and start sewing suits for my own collection of 1/6^thfigures.

Turlough and the Fifth Doctor.

The book contains knitting instructions for a cardigan, trousers and top intended to fit Action Man. For non-UK readers, Action Man is a toy soldier (similar to GI Joe in the USA). The knitter can vary the colour of wool used to create different Doctor outfits. My mother followed the pattern to knit the cardigan worn by the second Doctor, above; it was simple and quick to make. As I’m stronger at sewing than knitting, I raided the remnants box and improvised all the other items of clothing.

The way fashion dolls are gendered and racialised presents problems from a feminist perspective, as do the consumerist values doll manufacturers promote. But dolls are also eminently hackable and easy to queer. Rather than stick rigidly to Action Men—whose military masculinity is already a curious choice for modelling the Doctor—I dressed dolls of differing ages, genders and ethnicities.

So far I’ve only had time to make Classic Who costumes (I balked at doing all the assistants as well, but couldn’t resist trying a femme Turlough, pictured right). Doctors nine to eleven are on the list…

My friend and I cosplaying at Gally. How adorable are we? Unsurprisingly, we didn't care much about boners when making or wearing these.

Of course Cosplay Appreciation Day devolved into some asshole decrying cosplayers for being fake geek girls. Because, honestly.

Look, geek men. We’re all tired of saying this.

You are not the judge of who’s a “real” geek. Not even if you have a penis. Not even if you’re white. Not even if you work in the industry. Not even if you’ve been a geek for decades. No one crowned you gatekeeper of the geeks, and it makes you look like a pretentious douche to act like you are one.

Women who cosplay, whether they are doing “sexy” cosplay or not, do so for a variety of mostly complex reasons. I’m going to hypothesize, from my conversations with cosplayers, that approximately none of them do it to give you boners and then turn you down for the pleasure of seeing you be sad about it. Even the ones who hope to get attention from men generally have other reasons.* Those reasons? All related to being a fan. Cosplayers cosplay because of love. They love the characters, the media, and/or the fan community. They are creating something beautiful and they are performing. This isn’t attention-seeking, this is fucking art.

Lots of women are geeks. Lots of women you don’t think are hot are geeks. Just because some cosplayers have the absolute gall to be fat, small-breasted, butch, or otherwise not conventionally beautiful doesn’t mean that they are just unsuccessful fake geek girls. Again, we’re not all trying to give you boners. I’m one of those cosplayers you’d probably call “con hot,” and my cosplay has nothing to do with you. I’m not going to cons because it’s the only place I can get men to pay attention to me. I don’t think so little of geek men as to believe that they’re so pathetic, awkward, and inexperienced that they would be desperate enough to hit on women like me who they don’t find that attractive. Come to think of it, I don’t think so little of myself to buy that scenario either.

In short, the geek world does not revolve around you. It doesn’t even revolve around men. Most cosplayers are not thinking about men or you when sewing their bustles or screenprinting their costumes or combing local thrift stores for the perfect jacket. And if you haven’t met a “real” geek woman who cosplays, it could be because you’re a dickhead, and women don’t want to talk to you.

*Seriously, if you wanted to get men to pay attention to you, would you choose to wear a low cut top and mini skirt, which you could buy in a store and wear to parties afterward, or would you spend hours of labor constructing and collecting pieces for a costume you’ll wear very few times only to cons?

COURTNEY SAYS:

I’m really excited about today’s publication of Chicks Unravel Time: Women Journey through Every Season of Doctor Who. Chicks Dig Time Lords felt a bit all over the place, for me, with some thoughtful and provoking pieces paired with more shallow commentary. However, from its table of contents, I gather that the sequel is more comprehensive and meaningful, consistently tackling issues of gender, race, sexuality, and power dynamics throughout the volume. And I can’t wait to read it.

Both Tansy and I have essays in this book! Mine is titled “Maids and Masters: The Distribution of Power in Doctor Who Series Three,” and is an exploration of the power dynamics between the Doctor and his companions (focused, of course, on Martha) and the Master and Lucy.

What’s so compelling about the Doctor? Why do so many different kinds of people jump in the TARDIS to travel with him? Is it his boyish charm, his goodness, his sense of humor?

I would argue that for most of the companions in the new series, the most attractive part of the Time Lord is his power. To convince Rose to leave her life for adventure, the ninth Doctor expands on the power he has: “Did I mention that it travels in time?” Later, Martha says to the crowd in the tenement in Last of the Time Lords, “I know what he can do.” That’s her vote of confidence for the Doctor, how she convinces the people of the Doctor’s importance: what he can do, not how good or brave he is. The adventure the Doctor offers his companion is inseparable from his power, from his ability to manipulate space and time, from his ability to threaten and fight enemies unimaginably evil and powerful. Power impacts every relationship the Doctor has, but it’s not something Who fans talk about often. We like to pretend, I think, that the Doctor’s extraordinary power isn’t important. We like to think that it doesn’t affect him or his relationships with others. We like to think that if companions are “strong” enough, sassy enough, smart enough, they are his equals. But no matter how many times a companion saves the Doctor, or how many times a companion stands up to him, they don’t have his power. The Doctor can manipulate space and time, travel through them in a manner even the humans of the future could only imagine. He can fix practically anything with his magic sonic screwdriver. He can hold the knowledge of infinite lifetimes in his head. He can read minds. He can (and does) force his will on others: he takes away Donna’s memory; he disables Jack’s ability to time travel; he traps a girl in a mirror. His power outstrips any possible capabilities of his companions.

The disproportionate power dynamic in the Doctor/companion relationships is something each companion in the new series struggles with at some point or another. When Rose protests in School Reunion, “I’m not his assistant,” she voices the frustration that many of the companions have felt with the Doctor. The truth is, they know that they are small next to the Doctor, who is practically a demigod. But they, along with most of the audience, resist that reality, insisting that they are as good as, as clever as, as important as the Doctor. And perhaps they are all those things. But they are not as powerful as him. And this crucial fact is never more evident than it is in Series Three, where it seems that unequal power distribution in close relationships becomes a near-constant theme.

I argue that Martha as John Smith’s maid is a visual exaggeration of, but not a departure from, Martha’s position as companion. Because I like to be provocative, apparently!

TANSY SAYS:

I am ridiculously excited to be in this book! I’ve enjoyed all of the ‘Geek Girls’ books from Chicks Dig Time Lords to Whedonistas and Chicks Dig Comics, but it’s great to see them coming back to the original idea of many female voices talking critically and squeefully about Doctor Who, with such a dynamite concept.

Personally I’m desperate to get my hands on a copy to see what Diana Gabaldon has to say about the Second Doctor and Jamie McCrimmon!

My own essay is “The Ultimate Sixth,” dealing with the problematic and erratic final Colin Baker season, Trial of a Time Lord (Season 23, 1986). Which I happen to love like the blazes, even though it’s broken in a million places.

There’s plenty of crunchy feminist discussion in my essay, of course – after all, there are some brilliant, strong female supporting characters in the story, most of them played by middle aged women such as Joan Sims, Honor Blackman and Lynda Bellingham. But perhaps of most relevant to Doctor Her readers is my discussion of the fate of Peri (Nicola Bryant), one of the more controversial production decisions of this era. Peri actually has two potential endings to her story, both problematic in different ways, and it’s one of those issues that has kept fans arguing for decades:

But that’s the problem, isn’t it? The marriage. Peri has two fates – to die twice at the hands of Crozier and Yrcanos, and to marry Yrcanos and live as a warrior queen. Neither of these are good options. The Doctor’s behavior to Peri takes on huge repercussions (never dealt with) upon her death, but the alternative is that she gets to live on an alien planet with a crazy warlord king whom she never displays any attraction to whatsoever. The closest thing to affection we see from her is exactly what you might reluctantly offer a large, vicious dog who almost bit your arm off, but was distracted at the last minute by a packet of sausages and now thinks it is your friend.

“There’s a good warlord” is not a basis for a lasting marriage. Neither is the moment when Yrcanos stops being funny for thirty seconds and strokes Peri’s cheek. She flinches, and you see how afraid of him she is. It’s chilling and creepy and I know it was the eighties but really, really? That’s her happy ending? That’s the best she can expect? I would so much rather hear that she went back to Yrcanos’ home planet, introduced his culture to democracy and kicked his arse in the polls. Peri for President!

COURTNEY SAYS:

We hope you’ll go and buy the book, and read the rest. We’re both proud of what we’ve contributed to this anthology, and I hope that this is just the start of Doctor Who fan books that contain numerous essays meaningfully analyzing Doctor Who with a feminist lens.

And if you’re interested in a book giveaway (let’s be honest, who isn’t), there’s one at Love & Monsters! Go enter before the 16th to be eligible!