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beccaelizabethDoctor Who (2005), Bad Wolf. By Russell T Davies
Bad Wolf & The Parting of the Ways are a two part story, but with such a change in tone and setting in the middle they separate pretty easily. The first one sets up a mystery, the answer is revealed at the end, the answer is a really big problem and the whole second half is about people trying to solve that problem, mostly with weapons.
Bad Wolf is the easy one from a cultural studies point of view. Between that and The Long Game you have intro media manipulation. You can start talking about false consciousness, Ideological State Apparatus and Repressive State Apparatus, interpellation, all the good Marxist stuff. An entire society is being treated as one homogenous audience, addressed only in the roles of audience/contestant or employee, their only alternatives being different ways of dressing chosen and judged by others. They’re presented with texts where people have to obey arbitrary rules on pain of death and cooperation doesn’t help because only one can survive, which encourages them to collaborate in their own oppression by voting others to their deaths, and where the idea of protest is reduced to painting the walls, changing the surface aesthetics, because the idea of changing the rules is beyond them. The rules are just the rules, automatic, and nobody asks who is behind setting it all up. The ideological apparatus, media, backed up by repressive force, the disintegrators in the games and the security men on the stations, combine to make the system appear natural, normal, inevitable, and keep everyone locked into it. Until the Doctor arrives. He’s called in by one who it would appear has the least choice and the least room to think about it all, the Controller wired in to the system when she was five, seeing only the game channels. She more than any of them is supposed to be locked in to the system, but this being Doctor Who there’s an optimism about the human capacity to break things up and bring about revolutionary changes, even if it takes the Doctor’s expertise to do so successfully. On the one level it’s a great swipe from scripted TV at the ‘unscripted reality’ genres that seem to be taking over. On other levels it’s about homogenising influences that distract with pretty surfaces and valorise divisive competition about trivialities. And who is behind all this? Daleks – symbols of ultimate evil, who hate all that is different and just want to use others as resources for making more like themselves. If any of that stuff about obeying the rules and doing their jobs seemed at all sensible before, which would be difficult what with all the deaths, it really loses it’s last bit of logic when the half million death machines are revealed. And it makes literal what the other levels have been saying – the games are providing cover for this huge threat.
All that gets recapped, quickly, at the start of Parting of the Ways. I’ll focus on that episode for my essay.
Doctor Who (2005), The Parting of the Ways. By Russell T Davies
If Bad Wolf was all about divisive competition, Parting of the Ways is all about collective action and how refusing to acknowledge the reality of the threat or join the collective is just going to doom everyone. Roderick, who played the system to win The Weakest Link and get Rose ‘killed’, refuses to believe there are Daleks even when he sees them. He played by the rules, he thinks he’s a winner, so he believes he should get a lot of money and go home. Daleks kill him anyway. This isn’t generally the literal fate of the worker who exploits his fellow workers, but it’s a lot more visual and exciting and fits into 45 minutes. Those who stand and fight the Daleks also get killed, which might seem to contradict my reading, but there’s two ways that makes sense. They’re mostly former employees. All the ones we recognise are those who had a little more knowledge-power-control while the ‘masters’ were hidden, the security guards and the floor manager and the programmers on floor 500. They thought they were manipulating others and staying outside the games. They have the weapons to fight back, the security guards’ guns and the systems internal defences. But all of these were given them by the ‘masters’ they worked for, and are ineffective weapons against them. Their power turns out to have been an illusion, and they all die horribly. They’re also alone, because the majority, the audience and contestants, will neither believe nor join them. After putting so much work into getting viewers to accept a powerless role to preserve staff power, they can’t turn them around fast enough to save themselves. Moore & Stevens suggest that, as with fairytales, Doctor Who teaches children through allegory and symbol, creating exaggerated or ‘monstrous’ ideas of good and evil and demonstrating the right ways to face problems. Through the fates of characters story reinforces social values. In Dalek stories there’s a pattern of ‘Evil Humans’ who make a Faustian bargain with the enemy and come to a bad end. [Butler, 2007, p138-139] The Game Station staff fit this category, even if they didn’t know who they were dealing with.
The others who die are Lynda and Captain Jack Harkness. Lynda starts out as one of the contestants, decides she’d rather stay with the Doctor, and won’t leave the station when the others are evacuated. When the defences are set up Captain Jack finds somewhere for her to stand and watch. She sees the Daleks destroying the Earth, everyone sat at home refusing to believe in the problem. She’s audience again, with a big glass ‘screen’ in front of her. But when the Daleks come for them that isn’t sufficient protection; they break through the glass and kill her. Television is a big black rectangle we see Daleks through. The implication is the screen is no protection. To stand and watch is not enough. But Captain Jack doesn’t just watch. Neither was he one of those running the con, this time, nor is he fooled. He saw through it, and he chose to stand and fight. So why does he get killed? Well, partly because he won’t run away and leave the others to it. Good guys don’t just say they made their own trouble and can live with it. Even if it kills them, they try and change things. And he could have just left, at any time – we later find out the strap on his wrist is a time & space travel device that gets him off the station. So he gets killed in the heroic sacrifice way… and then he’s the only one who gets brought back. If he’d left earlier he wouldn’t have died, but he wouldn’t have become immortal. So Jack did the right thing and got rewarded.
The interesting thing about the Doctor in this is how useless he is. Or, rather, how it isn’t his conscious effort, his deliberate plan, which saves the day. It isn’t his technical knowledge or the weapon he built that stops the Daleks. In fact after all the death and destruction he decides using the weapon, killing so many to destroy even Daleks, is wrong. He’d rather be a ‘coward’. That’s also the word Jack chose earlier to describe himself, “much better off as a coward”. The Doctor decides he was right. As in many other episodes, the Doctor’s companions teach him: when to care, when the big picture isn’t enough, and when to stop. So the Doctor’s function in all this is mostly as inspiration. Though the story opens with the Doctor saving his companion, in the end it is the companion that saves everyone. This is interesting from the perspective of gender. I gave up on watching Heroes because of the limited role women were allowed in saving the world; in the end, women only inspired the men to be heroes, which is traditional, and doesn’t leave much room for women to have power of their own. But the end of Parting of the Ways is all about a woman’s power. Rose makes a choice, refuses to be protected, sent home, treated like a child; she stands up and says it’s her turn to save the Doctor. And then she does. And, sort of in passing, destroys all the Daleks and saves Jack’s life. Now that’s girl power.
The specifics get a little odd. It isn’t exactly heroic to risk an unvalued life because there’s ‘nothing for me here’. And as far as method goes breaking a complex, irreplaceable, living ship seems strange, especially when compared to how useless the Doctor’s technical wizardry is. It seems to devalue knowledge and suggest violence will do just as well. But the words aren’t about breaking the TARDIS, they’re about talking. It’s an act of communication. Add to that the imagery of the breaking chains, and maybe that last scene isn’t Rose hitting things until they work, it’s the TARDIS finally getting out of its box and getting a voice. Power of the worker in action. Both Rose and the TARDIS were sent home to live to death in peace while the Doctor worked at saving the world, and both Rose and the TARDIS returned because they refused to be limited to that role. Then the final imagery, where the Doctor takes power out of Rose with a kiss, isn’t kissing disempowering women. It’s the Doctor accepting the power of the TARDIS, but letting it go. He doesn’t wave a hand and divide all his enemies, he lives by what he said, that nobody should have that power. He puts it back in a box so it won’t hurt anyone else. Or, given that the Doctor dies of that act, it could indeed be taking a woman’s power, and how that act is ultimately self destructive.
What gets to our screens is limited by factors in television production: time, money, technology. The script book makes a point of Daleks rolling along three at a time, because they only had three Daleks. Three heroes, Rose, Jack and the Doctor, confronted by three Daleks, make a visual contrast, the demographic variety on one side and the absolute uniformity on the other. But with advances in FX technology the Daleks can be multiplied in post production by computer, and instead of sets of three you get an impression of a Dalek horde, hovering and moving in three dimensions in the background around the Dalek Emperor. This creates the illusion of scale, depth, and being more than a green screen in front of the actors, so the effect is now of heroes massively outnumbered. The combination of model work with CGI creates one detailed, organic looking, one eyed Emperor, surrounded by absolutely uniform gold-bronze Daleks. This in turn supports the narrative, where the Emperor is the only one with a distinct personality. So the Emperor speaks more fluently than all the other Daleks; and the Daleks believe what he says. In a story about the power of stories to cover up massive contradictions in experience it is interesting that this is the first time Daleks have a religion. The grand narrative their Emperor presents them with allows them to ignore the contradiction of their own flesh, Dalek made of human parts. The story goes that their Emperor elevated them and made them pure and blessed, so they can tell themselves that and not self destruct as in Dalek. The production limitations do not undermine this; the creative solutions to them support it.
It’s the same with the sets. One set reused many times creates an effect of homogeneity even in the areas inhabited by humans, which is exactly what the Daleks in the story wish to enforce. The monotonous sets are an appropriate symbol for the one size fits nobody system, a symbol appropriate for three different stories in a 13 episode season, which helps the budget but also creates a unifying theme and story arc which in turn helps the season finale feel suitably epic, satisfying, and likely to keep people interested between seasons. The sets are made to appear different for different floors primarily through use of color, and mostly by lighting. This is a common technique, with varying degrees of success. It helps if you can film from different angles and with different props lying around on each level. If all you have is a ladder on a wall colored light doesn’t do much. But color and light have great capacity for symbolism, expression and mood effects. Earlier levels of the station use green or turquoise; blue and red are reserved for the most dangerous moments on floors 499 and 500. Those are the colors of emergency lights on police cars, and Torchwood commentaries suggest their use in that series deliberately evokes that. Red lit scenes or red backgrounds feel more dangerous. The blue of floor 500 has flashing red lights above the side doors, but is TARDIS blue, suggesting that safe space. Yet Dalek vision is also drawn in blue, and both Dalek ships and TARDIS interiors use gold with hexagon patterns. The colors and set design suggest connections between the Doctor’s vessel and the Daleks. This is reinforced when the Emperor talks directly to the Doctor, especially in those moment it is revealed the Doctors plan would exterminate the Earth: they’re both lit in purple. But when Jack says ‘Never doubted him, never will’ the Doctor stands up, into a different light pattern, so he loses most of the purple tint. Elsewhere the yellow and orange Rescue truck is chained to the gold TARDIS interior, the connection obvious, lending connotations to the gold glow which fills Rose as she goes to rescue the Doctor. Power is represented by light, but light effects are themselves powerful, even the ones that are conveniently cheap.
I said that this episode is about the power of collective action, or teamwork. The Daleks are defeated because Rose returned to save the Doctor. She was in time because Jack tried to save them both. She had the means because her mother Jackie and her boyfriend Mickey supported her. So it’s not just about teamwork – it’s about love, and the heroism inspired by love. Jack kisses the Doctor and Rose, the Doctor kisses Rose, Mickey hugs her and her mother loves her and Rose will risk her life for all of them. These are the heroes, and these are the people who represent what is good to feel and be and do in the stories of Doctor Who. If the text represented the interests of a dominant group you might expect all the heroes to be of that group, going out to save the poor vulnerable everyone-else. Such texts supported colonialism, or patriarchy, suggesting that oppressed groups really needed someone else in charge. But Doctor Who consciously avoids that. The heroes that save the world are of different classes, genders, ethnicities, generations and sexualities, and not only is that clear, it is important, and a good thing. Because of their variety of backgrounds they have different skills and think of different solutions. Jackie cares about her daughter, and therefore wants her strong, so while she wants to protect her she hands her the resources she needs to do things for herself. Mickey cares about his girlfriend, so when she wants to leave he’ll use his vehicles to help her, breaking chains rather than trying to tie her down. Jack loves both the Doctor and Rose, so he’ll protect the Doctor, and Rose in turn saves them both. Instead of a homogenous group they’re written in praise of diversity, and how diversity is not divisive. Their differences also invite a diverse audience in, giving different groups someone to identify with and cheer on, which reaches a wider audience. Doctor Who is intended as family viewing for a society where family can be multicultural in many ways. Daleks, representing hatred of difference, are therefore the representation of evil, but the Doctor and his assorted friends defeat them every week just by being valued as heroes.
Bibliography
Doctor Who : Bad Wolf [TV Programme] BBC1. 11 Jun 2005
Doctor Who: The Parting of the Ways [TV Programme] BBC1. 18 Jun 2005
Also their DVD commentaries and extras.
Chapman, James. (2006) Inside the tardis : the worlds of Doctor Who : a cultural history London : I. B. Tauris
Moore, F. & Stevens, A. (2007) ‘The human factor: Daleks, The ‘Evil Human’ and Faustian legend in Doctor Who’ in Butler, D (ed) (2007) Time and Relative Dissertations in Space. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Newman, K. (2005) Doctor Who, BFI TV Classics Series London : BFI.
Russell, G. (2006) Doctor Who: The Inside Story. London: BBC Books
Tulloch, J. & Jenkins, H. (1995) Science fiction audiences : watching Doctor Who and Star Trek London : Routledge
Wood, T & Miles, L. (c2006) About time : the unauthorized guide to Doctor Who. Volumes 1-6. Des Moines, IA : Mad Norwegian Press.
Also the Script Book, which I have sitting right next to me but the lights are out.
I wrote this essay on accident while trying to write 500 words for a presentation. I got 500 out of Bad Wolf and 2200 out of Parting of the Ways. Then I handed in a rough draft two weeks early. I polished and sent a final version on the deadline day. Most straightforward essay ever. This is what happens when you get to write for credit the same stuff you write as a fan every week. Though the other thing that happens is I get sloppy about quotes and references, which is less good.
Haven't got a mark back for this yet, but have been told it definitely passed.
Bad Wolf & The Parting of the Ways are a two part story, but with such a change in tone and setting in the middle they separate pretty easily. The first one sets up a mystery, the answer is revealed at the end, the answer is a really big problem and the whole second half is about people trying to solve that problem, mostly with weapons.
Bad Wolf is the easy one from a cultural studies point of view. Between that and The Long Game you have intro media manipulation. You can start talking about false consciousness, Ideological State Apparatus and Repressive State Apparatus, interpellation, all the good Marxist stuff. An entire society is being treated as one homogenous audience, addressed only in the roles of audience/contestant or employee, their only alternatives being different ways of dressing chosen and judged by others. They’re presented with texts where people have to obey arbitrary rules on pain of death and cooperation doesn’t help because only one can survive, which encourages them to collaborate in their own oppression by voting others to their deaths, and where the idea of protest is reduced to painting the walls, changing the surface aesthetics, because the idea of changing the rules is beyond them. The rules are just the rules, automatic, and nobody asks who is behind setting it all up. The ideological apparatus, media, backed up by repressive force, the disintegrators in the games and the security men on the stations, combine to make the system appear natural, normal, inevitable, and keep everyone locked into it. Until the Doctor arrives. He’s called in by one who it would appear has the least choice and the least room to think about it all, the Controller wired in to the system when she was five, seeing only the game channels. She more than any of them is supposed to be locked in to the system, but this being Doctor Who there’s an optimism about the human capacity to break things up and bring about revolutionary changes, even if it takes the Doctor’s expertise to do so successfully. On the one level it’s a great swipe from scripted TV at the ‘unscripted reality’ genres that seem to be taking over. On other levels it’s about homogenising influences that distract with pretty surfaces and valorise divisive competition about trivialities. And who is behind all this? Daleks – symbols of ultimate evil, who hate all that is different and just want to use others as resources for making more like themselves. If any of that stuff about obeying the rules and doing their jobs seemed at all sensible before, which would be difficult what with all the deaths, it really loses it’s last bit of logic when the half million death machines are revealed. And it makes literal what the other levels have been saying – the games are providing cover for this huge threat.
All that gets recapped, quickly, at the start of Parting of the Ways. I’ll focus on that episode for my essay.
Doctor Who (2005), The Parting of the Ways. By Russell T Davies
If Bad Wolf was all about divisive competition, Parting of the Ways is all about collective action and how refusing to acknowledge the reality of the threat or join the collective is just going to doom everyone. Roderick, who played the system to win The Weakest Link and get Rose ‘killed’, refuses to believe there are Daleks even when he sees them. He played by the rules, he thinks he’s a winner, so he believes he should get a lot of money and go home. Daleks kill him anyway. This isn’t generally the literal fate of the worker who exploits his fellow workers, but it’s a lot more visual and exciting and fits into 45 minutes. Those who stand and fight the Daleks also get killed, which might seem to contradict my reading, but there’s two ways that makes sense. They’re mostly former employees. All the ones we recognise are those who had a little more knowledge-power-control while the ‘masters’ were hidden, the security guards and the floor manager and the programmers on floor 500. They thought they were manipulating others and staying outside the games. They have the weapons to fight back, the security guards’ guns and the systems internal defences. But all of these were given them by the ‘masters’ they worked for, and are ineffective weapons against them. Their power turns out to have been an illusion, and they all die horribly. They’re also alone, because the majority, the audience and contestants, will neither believe nor join them. After putting so much work into getting viewers to accept a powerless role to preserve staff power, they can’t turn them around fast enough to save themselves. Moore & Stevens suggest that, as with fairytales, Doctor Who teaches children through allegory and symbol, creating exaggerated or ‘monstrous’ ideas of good and evil and demonstrating the right ways to face problems. Through the fates of characters story reinforces social values. In Dalek stories there’s a pattern of ‘Evil Humans’ who make a Faustian bargain with the enemy and come to a bad end. [Butler, 2007, p138-139] The Game Station staff fit this category, even if they didn’t know who they were dealing with.
The others who die are Lynda and Captain Jack Harkness. Lynda starts out as one of the contestants, decides she’d rather stay with the Doctor, and won’t leave the station when the others are evacuated. When the defences are set up Captain Jack finds somewhere for her to stand and watch. She sees the Daleks destroying the Earth, everyone sat at home refusing to believe in the problem. She’s audience again, with a big glass ‘screen’ in front of her. But when the Daleks come for them that isn’t sufficient protection; they break through the glass and kill her. Television is a big black rectangle we see Daleks through. The implication is the screen is no protection. To stand and watch is not enough. But Captain Jack doesn’t just watch. Neither was he one of those running the con, this time, nor is he fooled. He saw through it, and he chose to stand and fight. So why does he get killed? Well, partly because he won’t run away and leave the others to it. Good guys don’t just say they made their own trouble and can live with it. Even if it kills them, they try and change things. And he could have just left, at any time – we later find out the strap on his wrist is a time & space travel device that gets him off the station. So he gets killed in the heroic sacrifice way… and then he’s the only one who gets brought back. If he’d left earlier he wouldn’t have died, but he wouldn’t have become immortal. So Jack did the right thing and got rewarded.
The interesting thing about the Doctor in this is how useless he is. Or, rather, how it isn’t his conscious effort, his deliberate plan, which saves the day. It isn’t his technical knowledge or the weapon he built that stops the Daleks. In fact after all the death and destruction he decides using the weapon, killing so many to destroy even Daleks, is wrong. He’d rather be a ‘coward’. That’s also the word Jack chose earlier to describe himself, “much better off as a coward”. The Doctor decides he was right. As in many other episodes, the Doctor’s companions teach him: when to care, when the big picture isn’t enough, and when to stop. So the Doctor’s function in all this is mostly as inspiration. Though the story opens with the Doctor saving his companion, in the end it is the companion that saves everyone. This is interesting from the perspective of gender. I gave up on watching Heroes because of the limited role women were allowed in saving the world; in the end, women only inspired the men to be heroes, which is traditional, and doesn’t leave much room for women to have power of their own. But the end of Parting of the Ways is all about a woman’s power. Rose makes a choice, refuses to be protected, sent home, treated like a child; she stands up and says it’s her turn to save the Doctor. And then she does. And, sort of in passing, destroys all the Daleks and saves Jack’s life. Now that’s girl power.
The specifics get a little odd. It isn’t exactly heroic to risk an unvalued life because there’s ‘nothing for me here’. And as far as method goes breaking a complex, irreplaceable, living ship seems strange, especially when compared to how useless the Doctor’s technical wizardry is. It seems to devalue knowledge and suggest violence will do just as well. But the words aren’t about breaking the TARDIS, they’re about talking. It’s an act of communication. Add to that the imagery of the breaking chains, and maybe that last scene isn’t Rose hitting things until they work, it’s the TARDIS finally getting out of its box and getting a voice. Power of the worker in action. Both Rose and the TARDIS were sent home to live to death in peace while the Doctor worked at saving the world, and both Rose and the TARDIS returned because they refused to be limited to that role. Then the final imagery, where the Doctor takes power out of Rose with a kiss, isn’t kissing disempowering women. It’s the Doctor accepting the power of the TARDIS, but letting it go. He doesn’t wave a hand and divide all his enemies, he lives by what he said, that nobody should have that power. He puts it back in a box so it won’t hurt anyone else. Or, given that the Doctor dies of that act, it could indeed be taking a woman’s power, and how that act is ultimately self destructive.
What gets to our screens is limited by factors in television production: time, money, technology. The script book makes a point of Daleks rolling along three at a time, because they only had three Daleks. Three heroes, Rose, Jack and the Doctor, confronted by three Daleks, make a visual contrast, the demographic variety on one side and the absolute uniformity on the other. But with advances in FX technology the Daleks can be multiplied in post production by computer, and instead of sets of three you get an impression of a Dalek horde, hovering and moving in three dimensions in the background around the Dalek Emperor. This creates the illusion of scale, depth, and being more than a green screen in front of the actors, so the effect is now of heroes massively outnumbered. The combination of model work with CGI creates one detailed, organic looking, one eyed Emperor, surrounded by absolutely uniform gold-bronze Daleks. This in turn supports the narrative, where the Emperor is the only one with a distinct personality. So the Emperor speaks more fluently than all the other Daleks; and the Daleks believe what he says. In a story about the power of stories to cover up massive contradictions in experience it is interesting that this is the first time Daleks have a religion. The grand narrative their Emperor presents them with allows them to ignore the contradiction of their own flesh, Dalek made of human parts. The story goes that their Emperor elevated them and made them pure and blessed, so they can tell themselves that and not self destruct as in Dalek. The production limitations do not undermine this; the creative solutions to them support it.
It’s the same with the sets. One set reused many times creates an effect of homogeneity even in the areas inhabited by humans, which is exactly what the Daleks in the story wish to enforce. The monotonous sets are an appropriate symbol for the one size fits nobody system, a symbol appropriate for three different stories in a 13 episode season, which helps the budget but also creates a unifying theme and story arc which in turn helps the season finale feel suitably epic, satisfying, and likely to keep people interested between seasons. The sets are made to appear different for different floors primarily through use of color, and mostly by lighting. This is a common technique, with varying degrees of success. It helps if you can film from different angles and with different props lying around on each level. If all you have is a ladder on a wall colored light doesn’t do much. But color and light have great capacity for symbolism, expression and mood effects. Earlier levels of the station use green or turquoise; blue and red are reserved for the most dangerous moments on floors 499 and 500. Those are the colors of emergency lights on police cars, and Torchwood commentaries suggest their use in that series deliberately evokes that. Red lit scenes or red backgrounds feel more dangerous. The blue of floor 500 has flashing red lights above the side doors, but is TARDIS blue, suggesting that safe space. Yet Dalek vision is also drawn in blue, and both Dalek ships and TARDIS interiors use gold with hexagon patterns. The colors and set design suggest connections between the Doctor’s vessel and the Daleks. This is reinforced when the Emperor talks directly to the Doctor, especially in those moment it is revealed the Doctors plan would exterminate the Earth: they’re both lit in purple. But when Jack says ‘Never doubted him, never will’ the Doctor stands up, into a different light pattern, so he loses most of the purple tint. Elsewhere the yellow and orange Rescue truck is chained to the gold TARDIS interior, the connection obvious, lending connotations to the gold glow which fills Rose as she goes to rescue the Doctor. Power is represented by light, but light effects are themselves powerful, even the ones that are conveniently cheap.
I said that this episode is about the power of collective action, or teamwork. The Daleks are defeated because Rose returned to save the Doctor. She was in time because Jack tried to save them both. She had the means because her mother Jackie and her boyfriend Mickey supported her. So it’s not just about teamwork – it’s about love, and the heroism inspired by love. Jack kisses the Doctor and Rose, the Doctor kisses Rose, Mickey hugs her and her mother loves her and Rose will risk her life for all of them. These are the heroes, and these are the people who represent what is good to feel and be and do in the stories of Doctor Who. If the text represented the interests of a dominant group you might expect all the heroes to be of that group, going out to save the poor vulnerable everyone-else. Such texts supported colonialism, or patriarchy, suggesting that oppressed groups really needed someone else in charge. But Doctor Who consciously avoids that. The heroes that save the world are of different classes, genders, ethnicities, generations and sexualities, and not only is that clear, it is important, and a good thing. Because of their variety of backgrounds they have different skills and think of different solutions. Jackie cares about her daughter, and therefore wants her strong, so while she wants to protect her she hands her the resources she needs to do things for herself. Mickey cares about his girlfriend, so when she wants to leave he’ll use his vehicles to help her, breaking chains rather than trying to tie her down. Jack loves both the Doctor and Rose, so he’ll protect the Doctor, and Rose in turn saves them both. Instead of a homogenous group they’re written in praise of diversity, and how diversity is not divisive. Their differences also invite a diverse audience in, giving different groups someone to identify with and cheer on, which reaches a wider audience. Doctor Who is intended as family viewing for a society where family can be multicultural in many ways. Daleks, representing hatred of difference, are therefore the representation of evil, but the Doctor and his assorted friends defeat them every week just by being valued as heroes.
Bibliography
Doctor Who : Bad Wolf [TV Programme] BBC1. 11 Jun 2005
Doctor Who: The Parting of the Ways [TV Programme] BBC1. 18 Jun 2005
Also their DVD commentaries and extras.
Chapman, James. (2006) Inside the tardis : the worlds of Doctor Who : a cultural history London : I. B. Tauris
Moore, F. & Stevens, A. (2007) ‘The human factor: Daleks, The ‘Evil Human’ and Faustian legend in Doctor Who’ in Butler, D (ed) (2007) Time and Relative Dissertations in Space. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Newman, K. (2005) Doctor Who, BFI TV Classics Series London : BFI.
Russell, G. (2006) Doctor Who: The Inside Story. London: BBC Books
Tulloch, J. & Jenkins, H. (1995) Science fiction audiences : watching Doctor Who and Star Trek London : Routledge
Wood, T & Miles, L. (c2006) About time : the unauthorized guide to Doctor Who. Volumes 1-6. Des Moines, IA : Mad Norwegian Press.
Also the Script Book, which I have sitting right next to me but the lights are out.
I wrote this essay on accident while trying to write 500 words for a presentation. I got 500 out of Bad Wolf and 2200 out of Parting of the Ways. Then I handed in a rough draft two weeks early. I polished and sent a final version on the deadline day. Most straightforward essay ever. This is what happens when you get to write for credit the same stuff you write as a fan every week. Though the other thing that happens is I get sloppy about quotes and references, which is less good.
Haven't got a mark back for this yet, but have been told it definitely passed.