Research master thesis | Literary Studies (research) (MA)
open access
As the first episode of BBC's astronomically long-running science fiction show Doctor Who opens on November 11th, 1963, the audience is treated to a set of images portraying a foggy junk yard, in...Show moreAs the first episode of BBC's astronomically long-running science fiction show Doctor Who opens on November 11th, 1963, the audience is treated to a set of images portraying a foggy junk yard, in which an apparently out-of-use police box is standing. The print on the front of the police box (“Police Telephone / Free for Use of Public / Advice and Assistance Obtainable Immediately / Officers and Cars Respond to Urgent Calls / Pull to Open”) lingers on the screen before “An Unearthly Child” turns to a scene showing what seems to be a teenage 1960's school girl, outrageously outwitting her school teachers. In what follows, the audience, together with the girl's teachers Ian Chesterton (a role by William Russell) and Barbara Wright (played by Jacqueline Hill), discover that the girl, Susan Foreman (Carol Ann Ford), has as an unlikely dwelling place the police box from the opening scene. In addition, she does not even live there alone, but together with her grandfather – a figure known only as the Doctor (at this moment portrayed by William Hartnell). It transpires that the discarded police box is not at all a discarded police box, but rather a “bigger on the inside” space-and-time travelling machine know as a TARDIS. Moreover, Susan and the Doctor turn out to be not a 1960's school girl and her grandfather but “wanderers in the fourth dimension […] exiles […] Susan and I [The Doctor] are cut off from our own planet.” In other words, though they look completely human, the Doctor and Susan are time-travelling aliens; and not only that – they possess a technology and knowledge far more advanced than our own. This is apparent most obviously in the simple fact that they have – and know how to work with – a time travelling machine, but also for example when the Doctor responds to Ian's objection that “You're treating us [Ian and Barbara] like children” how “The children of my [The Doctor's] civilisation would be insulted!”; the Doctor implies that even the children on his and Susans home world would understand much more about technology and science than Ian and Barbara currently do. In a way, we might think of the Doctor and Susan as post-humans – as an attempt by the series' makers to imagine what it might mean to think beyond humanity and away from a human-centred focal point. This is a streak that the series would continue in the 53 (and counting) years to come; if only since the Doctor is, after all, the protagonist to the series. Because a sense of the posthuman seems so central to Doctor Who, this thesis will explore the ways in which the series, through being an object of science fiction as well as one of popular imagination, explores what it might mean, and in doing so, highlights the difficulties of, thinking in the lines of a philosophical current that has in recent years come to be know as posthumanism.Show less
