TARDISbound: Navigating the Universes of Doctor Who

TARDISbound: Navigating the Universes of Doctor Who

Piers D. Britton

Language: English

Pages: 272

ISBN: 1845119258

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Doctor Who has always thrived on multiplicty, unpredictability and transformation, its worlds and characters kaleidoscopic and shifting - and its complexity has exponentially increased over the last twenty years. With its triumphant return to TV in 2005, Doctor Who existed in four different fictional forms, across three different media, with five actors simultaneously playing the eponymous hero. TARDISbound is the first book to deal both with the TV series and with the "audio adventures," original novels, and short story anthologies produced since the 1990s, engaging with the common elements of these different texts and with distinctive features of each.
 
TARDISbound places Doctor Who under a variety of lenses, from examining the leading characteristics of these Doctor Who texts, to issues of class, ethnicity and gender in relation to the Doctor(s), other TARDIS crew-members, and the non-human/inhuman beings they encounter. TARDISbound also addresses major questions about the aesthetics and ethical implications of Doctor Who.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From prior Doctors’ foppishness, and from elements of the classic series which might appeal to a ‘camp sensibility.’ One could argue that there has been no shortage of camp in the new series. It has been manifest not only in monstrous adversaries such as the Slitheen – who masquerade as well-fleshed humans, farting regularly and spoofing the behaviour of those they impersonate – but also sympathetic characters such as the Doctor’s on-again, off-again queer companion, Captain Jack. Yet overtones.

Binary ‘switch’ model whereby something is defined by possessing an opposite, and the two are always seen as mutually exclusive: high/low, on/off, wet/dry, and so forth. David Halperin (among others) has argued that the queer inherently resists restrictive definition within a binary; he regards the queer as ‘an identity without essence’ marking ‘whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant.’ 142 I characterize the Eleventh Doctor as a queer or ‘queering’ figure here not.

Screen fiction, his performance and sartorial presentation destabilized it with overtones of ‘feminized’ theatricality. During Tennant’s incumbency this tension substantially abated, as the Doctor’s spectacular potential was reorganized to serve rather than undercut the paradigm of the narcissistic hero, the paradigm upon which scripts under Russell T. Davies so emphatically insisted. With Smith and Moffat the tensions are not ironed out but on the contrary very deliberately highlighted. In.

Initially being introduced as his grandchildren.) As long as the Doctor’s appearance was that of an old man, a mature male (Ian Chesterton, Steven Taylor), and initially also a mature female (Barbara Wright), bridged the age gap between him and his wards, serving as ‘parent’ figures. The younger-seeming Second Doctor needed no such intermediary, and his chief male companion (Jamie McCrimmon) therefore became another dependent youth. Although a shift of role for the Doctor’s main companion.

Doctor Who’s evolution, or in different media. Take, for example, ‘Spare Parts’ and the following audio-serial release, ‘... ish.’ Marc Platt’s ‘Spare Parts’ draws on one of the richest seams of Doctor Who lore, the story and spectacle of the Cybermen, and is set in a world which is strongly evocative of England (or rather an ingrained myth of England) in the recent past. Whatever ‘otherness’ it may offer, the drama’s effect is bound to be most powerful for those with a prior familiarity with.

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