Shooty Dog Thing: Part One

 

There are many fandoms to which I consider myself a member – Star Wars, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, comic-book culture – but the one I feel the greatest sense of fan ownership toward undoubtedly is Doctor Who. To be honest, I primarily watch the TV show and devour the Panini official publication on a monthly basis, occasionally listening to a Big Finish audio and reading a spin-off book or comic when the subject matter interests me. Often, however, the show’s televised narratives and official interviews involving its stars and production people are not enough to satiate my desire to feel informed about the current state of the Doctor Who world, so I revel in going online and reading what my fellow fans think about this nearly half-century-old saga of an alien who travels time and space in an old Police Box.

Recently filling this gap in my fannish heart has been Shooty Dog Thing (Hirst Books 2010), by Paul Castle & Friends. This first volume collecting the best of the popular online fanzine Shooty Dog Thing runs the gamut from providing reviews of televised episodes and its ancillary spin-off to humorous ruminations on the often complicated state of being a Doctor Who fan. In his foreword to this collection, Paul Cornell, a Doctor Who “success story” in that he graduated from being a long-time fan to a popular writer of New Adventure novels and the new series itself, defends the rights of the fans who take the show too seriously, the ones who believe in “something huge and serious” and need to express it to their fellow fans. To this group, Cornell directs, “Write it in a fanzine,” adding, “If we ever meet, I’ll probably find you deeply irritating. But in many ways, that’s the point” (7). Cornell’s honest and many times true comment aside, fanzines, both print and online, are the perfect forum for allowing fans to participate in the community of Doctor Who. Like the young Harry Potter fans who find empowerment in Henry Jenkins’s Convergence Culture (See my last blog.), the type of Doctor Who fan whose voice may not be clearly heard in certain social circles achieves a sense of empowerment in this form of the written word. After all, many of us who are active online would agree that our print selves are finer, more coherent representations of our thoughts and ideas than our awkward physical mouths could ever express…  

After Doctor Who was quietly axed by the BBC after its 1989 season ended, the fate of the character of Ace, who traveled with the Seventh Doctor, was left in limbo. Her life subsequent to the show was charted in the New Adventures and BBC novels, the official magazine comic books, and in the Big Finish audios, but none of these narratives were composed in a single, unified strand. Addressing this issue is a piece by Castle and Stephen Gray, “Equal and Opposite Fan Reactions.” While Gray makes “The Case for Unification” by attempting to reconcile the various disparate Ace-story threads, Castle celebrates the incongruity occurring amongst these continuity-challenged pieces. Gray’s part of the argument does a respectable job of attempting to link together the stories, but I am more moved by Castle’s comment regarding enjoying the Ace-stories for their divergent narrative paths: “I prefer the concept of there being a collection of Doctor Who continuities to choose from, a mythos that’s structured like the tree of life, with different branches of the tree spouting from the main trunk” (38-39). Although Gray’s simile for accepting and celebrating continuity snafus is perhaps a bit hippy-dippy sounding, it does reduce anxieties in the minds of fans for feeling an obligation of sorts to impose the seemingly chronological pattern of our lives to a fictitious universe that should not be constrained by such petty mortal orderings of time and flat characterization.

Science-fiction television, as much as it purports to be about the future, often, through extrapolation of present events or the safe-screen of allegory, reflects contemporary anxieties and fears about the modern world. The original permutation of Star Trek offers a good case study of this storytelling approach, with episodes commenting on such hot-button topics of the later 1960s as race, the Vietnam War, and drug abuse. From time to time, Doctor Who has presented stories dealing with present-day issues through the lens of a future setting. Commenting on how the tales from the “classic” Doctor Who era (1963-89) serve as a barometer for speculating upon life in the twentieth-first century is Patrick Mulready in his contribution to Shooty Dog, “The Twenty-First Century Is When It’s All Gonna Change…” Mulready explores how respective stories from the Second, Fifth, and Seventh Doctors reflect the respective production teams’ feelings toward the forthcoming century at various times.

He also frames his argument with Captain Jack’s tagline from the opening narration for the credits accompanying the first two seasons of the adult-oriented Doctor Who spinoff, Torchwood, which claims that everything changes in the twenty-first century, so humanity has to be ready.  I am sure that Mulready’s well-argued attempt to apply a line from a twenty-first century BBC show to episodes filmed decades ago for its mother series may have seem like an act of an obsessive fan to some readers of Shooty Dog Thing.  At the same time, returning to Cornell’s call for fans being given fair space to express their complicated theories on Doctor Who, Mulready’s essay is a testament to the fantastic type of analytical thinking that obsesses some fans regarding any particular object of study, whether it involves cult television shows, esoteric historical events, or when certain trains pass down a line.

The later part of the first half of this anthology collection I read this week concerns itself with reevaluating Colin Baker’s performance as the Sixth Doctor. On a personal note, I enjoyed Baker’s acerbic, unpredictable performance as the sixth iteration of my favorite Time Lord, and I cursed the BBC when they rudely sacked him from the role after two tumultuous seasons of being-the-scenes drama and inner-corporate politics. Luckily, Baker was able to continue in the role, first through a 1989 stage play, followed by unofficial spin-offs in the form of The Stranger videos, and then in official Big Finish audios, where he helped craft a better, well-rounded version of his Doctor. The series of essays found in Shooty Dog Thing thereby offer a positive reevaluation of Baker’s past and present contributions to the show’s mythology, standing in significant contrast to the unfair portrait of the Sixth Doctor in fandom circles as a clownish, unlikeable character whose troubled era signaled the death throes of the original series. Just knowing there exists a group of fans who share my views on Colin Baker’s Sixth Doctor reminds me of the beauty of the written word and how it can reach out in the form of fanzines to remind me that I am not alone with my occasional unpopular views on aspects of the show!