Image Credit: Paul Dykes (CC BY-SA 2.0, Flickr)

Image Description: A 1960s-style Dalek

By Matthew Kilburn

Chris Chibnall’s Doctor Who fanhood was forged in the 1980s. It was an era when Doctor Who fandom was preoccupied by preservation and recovery to a degree which is difficult to capture today. Today’s prevailing fan ideology seems to be the celebration of Doctor Who as an expression of perpetual change. In the 1980s, leading voices were preoccupied with reversing the series’ perceived decline by appealing to the past. An opinion piece in one prominent fanzine, DWB, on the eve of Season Twenty-One in 1984 thought that it would demonstrate a return to the values of the ‘monster season’, Season Five, in 1967/68. Others might yearn for a return to Gothic horror. In recent interviews, Chris Chibnall has presented his decision to give the Thirteenth Doctor three companions as a return to the series’ original format of 1963. Speaking to Doctor Who Magazine 577 (April 2022), he expressed his belief that the programme’s ‘inherent DNA’ is ‘An Unearthly Child and the first Dalek story’ which a writer ‘shouldn’t try to get too far away from that, because that’s what everyone loves about Doctor Who’. This is conceivably problematic, apparently discarding decades of development and reconceptualisation. Accommodating the evolution of Doctor Who over more than half a century, attempting to recreate the balance of regular characters from 1963, and innovating with the series’ first woman lead, risked tensions which the first year of Chris Chibnall’s Doctor Who had difficulty supporting. 

This article can’t explore all those tensions, but it can prod at some of the ways they resolved themselves and what this meant for the Doctor Who of 2018 as it adapted an ensemble model devised in, and for, the circumstances of the series in 1963. That ensemble of regulars had already been fashioned and refashioned several times before Doctor Who made it to studio in autumn 1963. The dynamic is generally the same. There are two teachers, who eventually gain the names Ian and Barbara – Ian having a high proportion of physical prowess, and Barbara’s gifts being intellectual or empathic. There is the schoolgirl, initially a secondary modern schoolgirl of average intelligence or less, who is then reconceived as more unpredictable and alien. We know her as Susan. Lastly, there is the older man with ‘a character twist’ who becomes first ‘Dr. Who’ – an old man lost in the fog whom the other characters have to help, and then the eponymous time traveller wandering in the fourth and fifth dimensions motivated by the need to protect his granddaughter Susan.

Graham Who and Ryan Foreman

Drawing out the parallels between this group of travellers and those in the TARDIS during the Thirteenth Doctor’s first season helps to illustrate why some viewers had difficulty adjusting to the 2018 cast of Doctor Who. Relationship patterns are carried through in ways which distort the dynamics audiences might have expected. The Doctor Who of 1963 and the Doctor Who of 2018 both have older men with a ‘character twist’, but in 1963 he was the title character, and in 2018 he was not.

Much of the narrative of Doctor Who in its first season is driven by the relationship between the Doctor and Susan. Making the ‘older man’ the grandfather of the problematic schoolgirl helped counterweight the obvious common interest of abducted schoolteachers Ian and Barbara while giving him some positive motivation. Without Susan to look after, the Doctor could have been a far colder figure, with only escape from trauma to drive him on. Worse, he might have desired to ‘nullify the future’, as suggested by one of Doctor Who’s creators, C.E. Webber, but rejected by its presiding genius Sydney Newman. When some fan critics thought that Series Eleven of Doctor Who was led by Graham rather than by the Doctor, they were arguably both repeating a well-tried criticism of twenty-first-century Doctor Who (dissatisfied fans using ‘Rose Who’ in 2005 and 2006, and ‘Clara Who’ for the 2013 to 2015 series) but responding to the debt Graham and Ryan’s storyline owed to the Doctor and Susan.

Graham and Ryan travel partly because they are escaping trauma – the death of Grace for both, and cancer for Graham – much as the Doctor and Susan were escaping something unsaid in dialogue, but presumed to be the devastation or destruction of their home world. The shift from the post-war horror of mass annihilation to very personal, individual crises marks the relative distances British audiences had from total war in 1963 and 2018, and the magnification of individual over collective experience. Domestic crisis is also more in keeping with the reconfiguration of Doctor Who as pre-watershed Sunday night drama with a new set of genre rules to explore. The resolution of Ryan’s first series plot arc has parallels with that of Susan, albeit adapted for a later age as the conquest of Earth by Daleks becomes the possession of individuals by a Dalek. Where Susan finds a place in the rebuilding of society in a sexual relationship, Ryan finds peace in enabling the part-redemption of his father, both from being puppeteered by a Dalek and from neglectful parenting. His dyspraxia marks him as unusual and difficult to an older generation, as Susan’s unearthly knowledge did to her teachers in An Unearthly Child.

It’s easy to exaggerate the parallels. Graham is not Ryan’s grandfather, but he wants to be accepted by him as such. Nevertheless, both Graham and the first Doctor want to form a stable family unit with their vulnerable (step)descendant. Graham’s initial scepticism regarding the presence of aliens in Sheffield in The Woman Who Fell to Earth recalls Ian Chesterton’s refusal to believe the explanation of the TARDIS which he receives from the Doctor and Susan in An Unearthly Child, rather than anything expressed by the First Doctor. In some stories Graham performs a role as mischief-maker, a trickster role enjoyed by the First Doctor in Season One. He doesn’t have a monopoly on this behaviour, however, acting with the Thirteenth Doctor as her accomplice or agent in disrupting events in Rosa. His glib witticisms when facing a giant spider in Arachnids in the UK are in a tradition of flippancy in the face of danger more generally associated with the Doctor, but arguably also in the modern tradition of companions as apprentice Doctors prominent in twenty-first century Doctor Who. Nevertheless, in fulfilling the role of eccentric source of wisdom, albeit a folk wisdom rather than science, Graham fills a traditionally Doctorish role in much of the 2018 series. Both, too, are defined by loss: the First Doctor has lost his home world, while Graham has lost Grace, and both are seeking reorientation in an anchorless universe.

Yaz Chesterton

What, then, of Yasmin Khan? She is established early on as proactive, able to intervene in conflict situations. She is contrasted with Ryan as stable and reliable to his more chaotic nature, though both are unformed characters – arguably within and without the narrative – trying to work out what their potentials are. It’s Yaz, though, who is better at the ‘running and punching’ role associated with the 1960s model of male Doctor Who companion. She adheres to her professional identification as a police officer, much as the First Doctor’s two human companions in Season One couldn’t escape their background as schoolteachers. Yaz is the Ian Chesterton of this scheme, though she is younger and female. She has Ian’s knack of becoming most embedded in a new society, whether as an initiate of Rosa Parks or as a visitor to her own historical family in Demons of the Punjab. When allowed, she also deploys physical action decisively, be it a well-aimed kick moving the P’ting to somewhere it can do less damage in The Tsuranga Conundrum, or taking on Morax tendrils in The Witchfinders. In the same story, she even fulfils the role of science educator by asking informed questions of the Doctor – something supposed science authority Ian Chesterton found himself doing on occasion.

There are early indicators that Yaz’s adventures were to have been shared with Ryan. They are friends from primary school reunited, as established in The Woman Who Fell to Earth. They compare notes on the racism they’ve experienced in Rosa, where Ryan pays her a compliment. However, this isn’t the pairing which seemed most natural to viewers in script and performance. In Arachnids in the UK, Yaz’s mother assumes the Doctor is Yaz’s girlfriend, and for an intensely committed section of the audience, this sublimated attraction between Yaz and the Doctor became Doctor Who’s linking theme, apparently before the programme makers knew what they were doing themselves.

The relationship between Yaz and the Doctor has echoes of that between Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright, with both delayed from reaching a conclusion. Yaz’s feelings for the Doctor remain unarticulated for years. Ian appears possessive about Barbara in early episodes, but his experience on Skaro in The Daleks, struggling across hazards to reach the Dalek city, seems to change him. Having a romantic couple in the TARDIS would have been a distraction from the adventure in 1963/64, but in the twenty-first century it’s been part of it – Rose and Mickey, Martha’s unrequited feelings for the Doctor, Amy and Rory, the Doctor and River, Clara and Danny. Chris Chibnall’s Doctor Who initially seems to turn away from this trend, a signature of his predecessor Steven Moffat, with the primary romantic attachment of Series Eleven, Graham and Grace’s relationship, always framed through the lens of grief. There can be no joyful running around London in still photographs for the Doctor and Yaz, and indeed the assumption that Ian and Barbara will become a couple on Earth in 1965 remains just that, interpretations of their behaviour in the opening villa scene in The Romans and spin-off media notwithstanding. 

Doctor Wright

The Thirteenth Doctor retains a certain alienating prickliness from the Twelfth Doctor, though Jodie Whittaker leans into playing it as an almost endearing social gaucheness. However, Chibnall’s decision to adopt and adapt the four-regular structure of the 1963 writer’s guide directs the Doctor into a Barbara Wright-shaped space. Like Barbara, she generally tries to engage with people on their own terms, applying what she knows of the cultures she visits. Disapproval is concrete, even if the Thirteenth Doctor is more spatially and temporally empowered than Barbara or indeed the first Doctor were. Jodie’s Doctor is often pedagogic, most obviously in her lecture at the end of Rosa, recalling the observations on people and cultures Barbara might make in historical stories such as Marco Polo. 

The most persuasive parallel, though, is that the Thirteenth Doctor and Barbara share the same faith. In The Sensorites episode two, The Unwilling Warriors, Barbara explains to Carol, one of the human astronauts, that the TARDIS travellers aren’t wandering aimlessly; the Doctor is trying to return her and Ian to their own time. Susan provides a gloss, delivered in a tone on the borders of exhaustion and pessimism: isn’t it better to travel hopefully than arrive? While one of Susan’s traits is the need to settle and belong, Barbara adapts quickly to travelling in time and space. She welcomes new experiences and provides solutions to problems much as the Thirteenth Doctor does, trying to find ways through which don’t involve killing. The Thirteenth Doctor defines herself as a ‘Doctor of Hope’ in The Tsuranga Conundrum, marries Umbreen and Prem in the name of hope in Demons of the Punjab. She’s content with small victories such as the reforms at Kerblam, much as Barbara learns to be at the end of The Aztecs. Her parting advice at the end of Resolution is to travel hopefully, delivered like a teacher saying goodbye to a class. The legacy of Barbara Wright is alive in the Thirteenth Doctor.

The evidence above has been presented selectively. Nevertheless, embracing both the original character pattern of 1963 and casting a woman in her thirties in a lead role which was initially envisaged as a man old enough to be a grandfather demanded a reshuffle of characteristics and capabilities. Series Twelve reacts against this by sidelining Graham’s anxiety over being recognised by Ryan as his grandfather, and instead raises questions about the Doctor’s past with new details which revive and reconceive Season One’s presentation of the Doctor as a refugee. In becoming the Timeless Child, the Doctor becomes an echo of Susan, the Unearthly Child; alternatively, Susan becomes a shadow of her grandfather’s erased past, a past which is/was yet to be written. 

As a series which tells stories about time and space travel which has endured across formats for over half a century, and which is conscious of its own institutional status within British and broadcasting cultures, it is impossible for Doctor Who to avoid travelling through its own identity; its evolution defies linear paths. Any attempt to restore the series to an earlier point in its development will result in something unfamiliar; a conservative or reactionary interpretation of Doctor Who (as Chris Chibnall no doubt knew) must lead to innovation which surprises and unsettles, whether or not it is judged creatively successful.

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