{"id":338,"date":"2020-11-18T20:17:00","date_gmt":"2020-11-18T20:17:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gcolemanmn.wordpress.com\/?p=338"},"modified":"2023-08-25T11:20:19","modified_gmt":"2023-08-25T11:20:19","slug":"doctor-who","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/2020\/11\/18\/doctor-who\/","title":{"rendered":"Doctor Who"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Originally published as part of the Digestable<\/a> newsletter<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you told me a year ago that I\u2019d be writing this column from day 11 of quarantining in a Dublin apartment I would not have believed you.\u00a0\u00a0Of course everything that happens these days is pretty unbelievable \u2013 so much so that unbelievability has become pretty\u2026 unremarkable.\u00a0\u00a0I\u2019m pretty antsy to get out and see the city and I\u2019m having to resort to a constant diet of stimulation to keep myself distracted from the fact that I haven\u2019t been outdoors for more than 30 seconds since I got on a plane in Minnesota back in August.\u00a0\u00a0Luckily Irish Netflix has all of the new seasons of Doctor Who which has allowed me to escape into an embarrassingly nerdy but comforting part of my high school self.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For those of you who didn\u2019t go through a tea-drinking bowtie-wearing phase in 10th<\/sup> grade, Doctor Who is a British sci-fi show that follows a time traveling alien called The Doctor and their usually-human-always-British friends as they fight monsters, save worlds, and have a cute quirky time.  The Doctor has the ability to regenerate into new bodies, which has allowed 14 actors to cycle through the role and kept the show evolving throughout its 41 collective years on the air.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In high school I loved that show prominently featured queer characters and narratives \u2013 it\u2019s been able to do so since 2005.\u00a0\u00a0Part of the power of the show is how it deals with difference, when you\u2019re dealing with a universe of alien species across all of time, contemporary human ideas of sexuality are only a blip.\u00a0\u00a0The show, especially in recent seasons, is also able to use time travel to interrogate historical narratives of race and ethnicity.\u00a0\u00a0For instance, in the episode\u00a0Thin Ice<\/em>, we\u2019re shown that Victorian London was much less uniformly white as traditional histories claim \u2013 but the show doesn\u2019t try to omit racism for the sake of comfort.\u00a0\u00a0In the same episode contemporary black human Bill Potts, played by Pearl Mackie, confronts a villain who tics every box in the racist and sexist attitudes that defined power during the Victorian era.\u00a0\u00a0The villain then is eaten by the giant aquatic creature his family had enslaved for generations and his wealth is redistributed to a multiracial group of homeless orphans \u2013 the show can be a bit ham-fisted with the symbolism at times but really I\u2019m not mad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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My favorite thing about the watching the show as an adult is that it feels almost like conditioning for these predictably unpredictable times.\u00a0\u00a0Pretty much every episode involves some world ending catastrophe, on Earth or a spaceship or another planet and the characters have to band together, grapple with difficult concepts and dig for common values to act with ingenuity and love to set things right.\u00a0\u00a0One of my favorite recent episodes\u00a0Smile\u00a0<\/em>involves a human colony established on an alien planet after the Earth is evacuated from an unknown disaster, I picked climate change, you can draw your own conclusions.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Agnes Denes is absolutely QUAKING<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

\u00a0Some AI robots were sent up ahead with a team of humans to build the city before colonists arrive, but because of their inability to understand human emotion they kill their human crew when they show signs of distress \u2013 thinking it better to turn them into fertilizer than leave them unhappy.\u00a0\u00a0The Doctor (Peter Capaldi), Bill Potts (Pearl Mackie), and the surviving crew then have to figure out how to stop the robots from killing all the colonists (all that remains of the human race) when they arrive.\u00a0\u00a0The solution they come up with is to erase all knowledge of humanity from the robots\u2019 memory, effectively making them their own sovereign species indigenous to the planet.\u00a0\u00a0Then when humanity arrives, instead of having a servant population of robots they are forced to have meaningful dialogue with the robots and are transposed from the role of colonizer to refugee.\u00a0\u00a0In this one episode are themes of immigration, indigeneity, colonization, slavery, language, and refuge.\u00a0\u00a0The episode was also shot at the Santiago Calatrava designed Palau de les Artes in Spain \u2013 which amplifies all of the futurist dystopia\/utopia themes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I think the power at the center of Doctor Who is how the show makes use of the foil between The Doctor, a 2000-year-old time traveling alien, and their companions \u2013 usually contemporary everyday humans.  The Doctor\u2019s outside perspective allows us to call into question things humans take for granted \u2013 our fears, prejudices, and narratives \u2013 and the Doctor learns things from the humans, how to hope, how to forget, how to persevere.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Originally published as part of the Digestable newsletter If you told me a year ago that I\u2019d be writing this column from day 11 of quarantining in a Dublin apartment I would not have believed you.\u00a0\u00a0Of course everything that happens these days is pretty unbelievable \u2013 so much so that unbelievability has become pretty\u2026 unremarkable.\u00a0\u00a0I\u2019m… Continue reading Doctor Who<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[21,16,17],"class_list":["post-338","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-digestable","tag-architecture","tag-environment","tag-fiction","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=338"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":748,"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338\/revisions\/748"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=338"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=338"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=338"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}