Time Incorporated: The Doctor Who Fanzine Archives: Vol. 3: Writings on the New Series: Part One

With their three-volume Time Incorporated: The Doctor Who Fanzine Archives series, Mad Norwegian Press has been collecting past Doctor Who fanzine articles and presenting them in book format to a larger audience. Like License Denied (Virgin 1997) and Shooty Dog Thing (Hirst Books 2010) before it (which I reviewed in my two most recent blogs), these books serve a worthy purpose in exposing Doctor Who fandom to a critical discussion of the show by their peers. This last week, then, I have been reading Time Incorporated: The Doctor Who Fanzine Archives: Vol. 3: Writings on the New Series (Mad Norwegian Press 2011), a work in which the editors, Graeme Burk and Robert Smith?, comment in their foreword, “There is something about the print form that encourages careful writing and discerning writing” (15). For me, the editors’ words are not disparaging blogs such as this one, which I hope evinces a certain amount of quality in commenting on Doctor Who and its fans. But, honestly, when we know something is going to be published on the processed remains of trees, we strive to add a degree of finesse to the finished draft of our musings!

Comedy is definitely one of the requisite ingredients for composing a zine article, as fans should never take Doctor Who too seriously, reaching the point where their physical or mental health is at risk. This spirit of a respectable soupçon of humor in approaching the show is on display when Burk and Smith? remark on the visceral 2005 trailer for Doctor Who Series One: “The Doctor…tells us the viewer will meet ghosts from the past, aliens from the future, the day the Earth is consumed by flame – although he neglects to mention the farting aliens, the space pig or the burping wheelie bin” (37). The editors are dead on target with their tongue-in-cheek assessment of Series One, which is equally brilliant and problematic as it revives the series for a new generation of viewers. This honest approach continues in the several essays that comprise Part 1, “It’s Back!” and Part 2, “Trip of a Lifetime,” in which the authors praise Christopher Eccleston’s short-lived tenure as the Ninth Doctor, the effectiveness of the new series’ second episode, “The End of the World” in setting up the emotional, character-based writing for the show, and producer/head-writer Russell T Davies’s genius approach in stripping Doctor Who down to its core, essential elements: a Doctor, a companion, a TARDIS, and alien threats (most significantly, the Daleks).

In Part 3, “Children of Earth,” Smith?, writing from the POV of a fan disillusioned with David Tennant’s first series as the Doctor in the “The Revolution Has Been Televised,” argues that the show has become a “mainstream success, with scenes where children in the back of cars cheer the Doctor’s success while the parents are comically ignorant” (81). Smith? even appropriates the cultural studies term, “homonormativety,” which articulates how the media mainstreams gay subculture (77), by coining his own term, “Whonormativity” (80). Of course, I’m sure Smith? was eventually pleased with some of the concepts and story arcs of the subsequent seasons of the new series, because, after all, he did go to the trouble of co-editing this very collection with Burk! Another edgy piece is offered in Kate Orman’s considerations of race in Doctor Who with her contribution to this collection, “The Salt and Sweet.” Applying census statistics for the British population (82) and asking if racial stereotype for black characters can be applied to companions Mickey Smith and Martha Jones, Orman brings up problematic questions that remind me how both timely and troubling the show can be for viewers.

A fan of epistolary writing, I found Deborah Stanish and Burk’s back and forth on the subject of NuWho fans in Part 4’s “He Said, She Said,” “Love in the Age of Squee,” quite satisfying. Although I am what one would call an OldWho fan since my fandom started with the classic series, I do embrace the crazy-love the NuWho fans evince for the current series, particularly female fans who are emotionally moved by the characters and stories. From Stanish’s and Burk’s complementary missives, I learned about “shippers.” Stanish even so nicely clarifies the nuances of the term for Burk: “We may all be ‘new fans,’ but only a subset of us are ‘shippers,' and within the shipper group there are the One True Pairing or ‘OTP’ crowd – those who have a favored pairing – and the more general shippers: those who look for the emotional connection between any of the characters” (103). With this clarification of the terminology in mind, I actually have a better understanding of the NuWho fans I encounter who believe Rose Tyler was the Doctor’s one true love, instead of say River Song or Martha Jones, who would have been a great match for the choosy Time Lord if only he had appreciated her intelligence, wit, and beauty!

In the “Power of Cool,” Jack Graeme examines whether or not Doctor Who can now be considered cool. Using the media-fueled example of football as “a norm of masculinity” embodying coolness since it is “big money” (123) and how the “people operating within the fake worlds of advertising, promotion, and media imagery” use the term to “make us buy stuff” (125), Graeme truly delivers a scathing dissection of the term. However, his conclusion on the show’s coolness factor really resonates: “But let’s face it: in its soul, Doctor Who isn’t cool. Cool is about elitism, complacency, profit, media doublespeak, vanity and conformity. Doctor Who, fundamentally, about fighting evil…evil that, very often, involves elitism, complacency, profiteering, media doublespeak, vanity and conformity” (126). Since I view Doctor Who fandom as one embracing all newcomers, regardless of their income, looks, sexuality, or social graces, I wholeheartedly endorse Graeme’s denial that the show is cool.

“Morality Play,” Jonathan Blum’s piece in Part 5, “Hooray,” connects all of the narrative hints of cause-and-effect that Davies seeds throughout his seasons. For instance, he writes that Rose, in “Doomsday,” “isn’t standing there explicitly tracing the threads through time and space which viewers can see, showing that her smart remark to Queen Victoria directly led to the founding of Torchwood, which directly led to Canary Wharf, countless deaths, and her being separated from the Doctor forever” (157). In their introduction to this section of the book, Burk and Smith? claim that, under Davies’s stewardship of the show, Doctor Who, for the first time in its history, had become an “auteur production.” (139). By combining both Blum’s and the editors’ statements, we can see that Davies is a playful auteur indeed as he leaves enough space in his narratives to engage the fans in a sense of play; in other words, he gives them a sense of collaborative authorship as they participate in the viewing and critical reaction to the show.