Timeless Adventures (31 page)

The following week saw the broadcast of the episode
Dalek
, reintroducing the Doctor’s oldest foes. Mere days before the election, the
Radio Times
combined the return of the Daleks with that week’s election coverage in their acclaimed fold-out ‘Vote Dalek!’ cover, which saw a trio of Daleks patrolling in front of the Houses of Parliament. In September 2008, the cover went on to a surprise win as the best British magazine cover of all time in a poll run by the Periodical Publishers Association. The cover triumphed over 40 other contenders, including striking and influential covers of such top-selling magazines as (among others)
Empire, Nova, Oz, Private Eye, The Face
and
Vanity Fair
. One of the magazine professionals who’d nominated the cover was Adam Pasco, editor of the BBC’s
Gardener’s World
magazine. ‘It’s May 2005, the General Election is looming, and the public is wondering who to vote for: Labour? The Tories? No – vote Dalek!’ He went on to justify his choice: ‘This
Radio Times
cover captures the essence of the mood of the nation in a brilliant and original way, and delivers on every level. The cover is totally unexpected and brings a contemporary twist to the iconic image of a Dalek to grab readers of all ages at the newsstand.
Radio Times
really made a statement with this cover that is simple, to the point and encapsulates that quirky British sense of humour.’ The
Radio Times
cover, overtly linking
Doctor Who
and national politics (and by implication all that goes with it) was a natural outcome of the fact that the show had returned to serious political engagement for the first time in over 25 years.

Another thematic preoccupation of the new version of
Doctor Who
that echoed concerns from the 1970s version of the show was an interest in satirising consumerism and the influence of big business. Several episodes see giant corporations acting as fronts for various alien invasions, often connected to a consumer product or gadget.

The opening episode,
Rose
, may have missed an opportunity by not returning to the consumerism issues raised by
Spearhead from Space
and particularly
Terror of the Autons
, but plastic was not such a thrilling material in the twenty-first century as it had been in the 1970s. The following story, however, tackled rampant cosmetic plastic surgery. The Doctor and Rose travel to the year five billion in
The End of the World
and encounter the ‘last human’, Cassandra. All that remains of her is a piece of skin with a face stretched across a metal frame, and her brain contained in a container below. Described as both a ‘bitchy trampoline’ and ‘Michael Jackson’ by Rose, it’s clear that Cassandra is a satire on modern society’s health and beauty concerns, taken to an extreme.

Public health and well-being fads are a recurring theme of new
Doctor Who
, reflecting one of the primary preoccupations of the media in Britain. Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver’s campaigns to encourage school children to eat healthily figure in the episode
School Reunion
. The school meal chips (coated in Krillitane oil) are being used to condition the children to solve the Skasis Paradigm. This will allow the Krillitane control over the fundamental building blocks of the universe. While this plot takes a back seat to the nostalgic return (the first of several) of Sarah Jane Smith and K-9, the school meals and poisoned chips element struck a chord with the younger audience (along with the idea that their headmaster and teachers might be aliens, which feels like a story idea
Doctor Who
should have tackled long ago).

Such health issues wedded to big-business exploitation would reappear in the fourth-season premiere,
Partners in Crime
. The Doctor re-encounters Donna Noble (Catherine Tate), his one-off companion from the 2006 Christmas special,
The Runaway Bride
, while investigating Adipose Industries. The company distributes a mass-produced weightloss pill that, according to their company slogan, sees the ‘fat just walk away’. The pills cause human fat to be converted into an Adipose creature, spawning from the dieting human’s body. About the size of a bag of sugar, the lard-resembling Adipose simply waddle away from the sleeping human, who appears to have miraculously lost weight in their sleep. The seemingly beneficent company is, in fact, a front for an Adipose breeding programme, operated by the sinister Miss Foster.

Two episodes later,
Planet of the Ood
presented another evil corporation, this time involved in selling Ood creatures into slavery. The episode used spoof advertising to communicate the consumer benefits of owning a domesticated Ood. Where the Adipose breeding programme was getting out of control and threatening to destroy humans by converting them wholesale into new Adipose, the humans running Ood Operations in the year 4126 find themselves coping with an outbreak of Ood ‘red eye’. The conditions under which they are being kept (they are telepathic, but have been cut off from their collective unconscious) and their treatment by the humans are turning the normally docile Ood homicidal. Donna’s reaction raises the issue of slavery, in addition to the treatment of the Ood as essentially consumer goods (unfeeling domestic aides) rather than living creatures. The Doctor also makes a comparison between the Ood’s plight and that of the low-paid and illtreated foreign workers who make Donna’s affordable clothes.

Technology and gadgetry are the satirical focus of other stories. In the two-part adventure
Rise of the Cybermen
and
The Age of Steel
, the Doctor, Rose and Mickey find themselves trapped in a parallel universe in which the Cybermen are just emerging. The population of this world is controlled through the use of Bluetooth-style telephone earpieces. As the latest popular,must-have gadget, everyone has one, so everyone is susceptible to the signal that controls them and makes them head to Battersea Power Station to be converted into Cybus Industries’ Cybermen. The conversion is seemingly ‘sold’ to the population as a desire to ‘upgrade’, to access the latest life-extending technology. Like Germany during the rise of the Third Reich, the population of this Earth are sleepwalking to disaster through their faith in big corporations and shiny new technology, sold as a way of making their everyday lives easier. The viewing millions would recognise their own world exaggerated for dramatic effect and reflected back at them.

These two episodes also criticised the closeness of industry and government, something repeatedly explored by the 1970s incarnation of the show. The crippled John Lumic, whose personal interest in life extension drives his research into cyber-technology, controls Cybus Industries. Having illegally experimented on the homeless, Lumic knows that Britain’s president will not allow him to expand his technology into the consumer arena. He arranges the president’s elimination when he is a guest at Jackie Tyler’s birthday party, when the new Cybermen attack and ‘delete’ him. Lumic is then free to initiate his plans for the ‘ultimate upgrade’ of humanity.

A similar device to the mass-marketed EarPods was used as a front for the Sontaran invasion in the two-part
The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky
. In this case, it’s the ATMOS anti-pollution device, affixed to many cars (an ATMOS sticker can be glimpsed stuck to a taxi in
Partners in Crime
, foreshadowing these two episodes). The story postulates an alien race – the Sontarans returning to
Doctor Who
for the first time since
The Two Doctors
in 1985 – using a front to sell environmentally friendly devices to a mass population. They are then used to attempt to convert the atmosphere to a more Sontaran-friendly chemical make-up. This time, the must-have gadget is sold on the basis of a pro-environment message to tackle air pollution caused by cars. That the population can be fooled into participating in the downfall of their own planet while thinking they are taking action to save it is a clever twist on the big-business-andtechnology theme that recurs in a small-p political way throughout much of new
Doctor Who
. This not very subtle but actually quite clever satire is pitched at just the right level to engage a mass audience. They can be brought into the show through recognition of so much of the contemporary real world, but also enjoy the humour of the political, social and industrial satire that Russell T Davies and his team of writers can work into their
Doctor Who
scripts. If cleverly done, none of this interferes with the straightforward adventure that the younger audience expects.

Another regular target for the new
Doctor Who
is the mass media. Since the twenty-first century is a much more mediated society than even the 1980s (when
Doctor Who
was last in regular production), it was inevitable that the media would feature regularly within the narrative. However, the series has gone one step further and satirised media conventions and organisations.

Many of the (monotonously regular) invasions of Earth in the Russell T Davies period have been communicated to the audience and the characters in the drama through the media. BBC news channels often feature (from
Aliens of London
onwards), covering the events of the story, while the media is also used to give such events a worldwide scale. A seemingly US-based news channel (AMNN) pops up regularly, presented by the same female newscaster in each case (giving an almost subliminal level of continuity). This offers a perspective on each ‘end-of-the-world’ scenario that is different from that of London (distinct from the approach in the 1970s, when alien invaders seemed to have little interest in anything outside the Home Counties).

Beyond the use of mass media to expand the repertoire of story-telling tools available to writers, media organisations were prime among elements of modern life in Britain satirised by the new
Doctor Who
.
The Long Game
sees Christopher Eccleston’s Ninth Doctor and Rose arriving on Satellite Five in the year 200,000, during the time of the ‘fourth great and bountiful human empire’. Satellite Five is a news broadcasting station, transmitting 600 channels across the Empire, run by the Editor (Simon Pegg), an almost albino figure, seemingly answerable to a higher power that’s manipulating the content of the station’s broadcasts. Teaming up with two rebellious journalists, the Doctor investigates the mysterious Floor 500 (perhaps modelled after the infamous ‘sixth floor’ of BBC Television Centre, notorious among
Doctor Who
fans as the location of the offices of the executives who interfered in, and eventually cancelled, the programme in the 1980s).

This human empire has been manipulated for 90 years by a creature called the Jagrafess, which has used its position of control over the news to create a climate of fear (Davies once again referencing contemporary politics, particularly the fallout from the war in Iraq and 9/11). The Doctor realises that the human race has been enslaved and is not even aware of it, living as it is in a degree of comfort, in a strictly controlled but extremely limited society. Of course, the Doctor defeats the Jagrafess and the Editor and believes he has set the human population back on its correct course to possible utopia.

The title
The Long Game
only becomes meaningful when the Doctor returns to Satellite Five later that same season in
Bad Wolf
(the use of the same space station twice in one season echoes the debut year of Tom Baker’s Fourth Doctor). The Doctor, Rose and Captain Jack Harkness (who joined the TARDIS crew in
The Doctor Dances
) are separated and each finds themselves taking part in reality-television shows. Contemporary viewers would recognise
Big Brother,
What Not to Wear
and
The Weakest Link
as the three TV shows spoofed, along with their iconography and presenters. Contestants are seemingly killed when they are eliminated or ‘voted out’, including Rose. The Doctor escapes the
Big Brother
‘house’ and gains access behind the scenes, only to discover he’s back on Satellite Five at a later point in history. Now humanity has a different master: the Daleks!

Led by their Emperor (‘the God of all Daleks’), the Daleks have been harvesting humans to boost their numbers. In the opening to the season finale,
The Parting of the Ways
, the Doctor declares these new post-time-war Daleks to be mad, driven insane by self-loathing as they have had to depend upon human organic material to create their new race. Indeed, the Daleks are depicted as a fundamentalist religious group, crying blasphemy when the Doctor suggests they’re half-human (this is also a fan in-joke on the part of Davies, as the 1996 Paul McGann TV movie postulated that the Doctor was half-human, a development decried by a subset of online fans as blasphemy). These mad Daleks are limited to their appearance in this one story, but their fundamentalist nature reflects a very precise point in time following the 9/11 attacks on the US in 2001 and terrorist activity in the UK. The episode was broadcast just three weeks before Islamic fundamentalists carried out the 7 July 2005 attacks on transport in London. Religion and the threat posed by its fundamentalist proponents has not often featured in
Doctor Who
, but
The Parting of the Ways
did a fine job of updating Terry Nation’s original space fascists to confront one of the most important contemporary issues concerning the mass audience now attracted to
Doctor Who
. Unfortunately, by the time of
Journey’s End
in 2008, the Daleks were back to being simple space fascists, an aspect of their character made literally evident by the scene in which the Daleks conquering Earth speak German!

The Daleks’ rivals for the position of top
Doctor Who
monster were not about to be left out of the media spotlight. When the Cybermen returned again, in
Army of Ghosts
, their attempts to break through from their universe to ours cause them to appear as ghost-like figures. Once again satirising media conventions, the appearance of these ghosts across the world is shown to be a media sensation. The ‘supernatural’ events happen at the same time each day, with television providing a countdown. Rose’s mum, Jackie, is shown waiting for Rose’s dead grandfather to appear during the daily ‘ghost shift’. Clips from programmes like soap drama
EastEnders
or talk show
Trisha
reveal to the Doctor how the ghost phenomenon has been absorbed and normalised by the culture. Investigating, the Doctor realises the ghosts are Cybermen, pushing themselves through a breach between universes to become material in our reality. The full materialisation of the Cybermen (represented by reports from Indian, Japanese and French newsreaders) is topped by the opening of the mysterious Void Sphere captured by Torchwood. This reveals four surviving Daleks who escaped the Time War (the Cult of Skaro), setting the stage for a Cybermen-Dalek face-off in the following episode,
Doomsday
.