TARDIS Eruditorum - An Unofficial Critical History of Doctor Who Volume 1: William Hartnell

by Elizabeth Sandifer

First is that video game plotting is not integral to video games, but in fact stems from the highly serialized form of old-time radio and early film which Nation is also using here.

(Indeed, there are some stories in the Tom Baker era that are fine right up until the Doctor and Romana leave the TARDIS, at which point the whole thing goes to hell in a handbasket, due only half to the facts that the plot is crappy and it has a giant, furry bull monster, and half to the fact that, frankly, when you have Tom Baker and Lalla Ward available for light banter, it’s very difficult to come up with a compelling reason for them not to engage in it at great length. And honestly, a similar thing can be said for when you have William Hartnell and Jacqueline Hill, who are equally magnetic.)

“Indeed so little attention is paid to it that the franchise is riddled with countless, irreconcilable continuity clashes despite being presented as a single continuous story, even in the TV movie and continuing television series that were made many years after the original series was cancelled.”

there is no such thing as apolitical science fiction.

Whenever aliens show up, one thing those aliens signify, necessarily, is the issue of immigration and otherness. Any time a scientist insists that we are all in grave danger and is laughed off by the political establishment, it makes reference to the climate change debate, or, in older times, the debate over atomic energy and nuclear weapons. Any time technology becomes too advanced and a danger to us we have a commentary on genetic engineering, the Internet, or some older object of paranoia. Science fiction, by virtue of its conceit, is about the world and how it changes, and that’s necessarily political.

The Situationalist International’s approach was unusual in that it was based primarily on the concept of spectacle – that is, that it took media consumption as the essential metaphor for capitalism.

And this is part of being a Doctor Who fan. You are absolutely guaranteed to see the show die in front of you, and then get replaced with a strange, different show using the same name.

What is about to happen is not the end of the First Doctor’s tenure. No. It’s the end of the Doctor. William Hartnell only played the First Doctor once, in 1973. Otherwise, he was always simply the Doctor – playing the part for an audience that had no idea anybody else could be the Doctor. And what is about to happen is not the replacement of the first version with the second. It’s the replacement of the only version with something completely new.

It’s easy to romanticize the legend of Doctor Who, and to write a postmodernist collage of its central pillars by recycling famous dialogue and abandoned concepts into a clever, mythic collage. But in reality, Doctor Who is the product of writers imagining things and crafting them into scripts for money.