TARDISbound: Navigating the Universes of Doctor Who

TARDISbound: Navigating the Universes of Doctor Who

Piers D. Britton

Language: English

Pages: 272

ISBN: 1845119258

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Doctor Who has always thrived on multiplicty, unpredictability and transformation, its worlds and characters kaleidoscopic and shifting - and its complexity has exponentially increased over the last twenty years. With its triumphant return to TV in 2005, Doctor Who existed in four different fictional forms, across three different media, with five actors simultaneously playing the eponymous hero. TARDISbound is the first book to deal both with the TV series and with the "audio adventures," original novels, and short story anthologies produced since the 1990s, engaging with the common elements of these different texts and with distinctive features of each.
 
TARDISbound places Doctor Who under a variety of lenses, from examining the leading characteristics of these Doctor Who texts, to issues of class, ethnicity and gender in relation to the Doctor(s), other TARDIS crew-members, and the non-human/inhuman beings they encounter. TARDISbound also addresses major questions about the aesthetics and ethical implications of Doctor Who.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

15. 127.Ibid. 128.Laura Mulvey, ‘Afterthoughts’, p. 34. 129.Ibid. 130.Ibid.: p. 33. 131.Neale, ‘Masculinity as Spectacle’, p. 15. 132.‘The Time Warrior’, 1974. 133.Jennifer Craik, The Face of Fashion: Cultural Studies in Fashion (London and New York, 1994), p. 170. 134.Britton and Barker, Reading Between Designs, p. 195. 135.Steven Cohan, ‘ ”Feminizing” the Song-and-Dance Man: Fred Astaire and the spectacle of masculinity in the Hollywood musical’, in Screening the Male, ed. Cohan and

published results of an online poll in the Radio Times 40th Anniversary Special, p. 4 (pull-out from Radio Times, 22–28 November 2003). 140.On branding in the new series, see Hills, Triumph of a Time Lord, pp. 66–70. 141.Matt Hills, ‘ ”New New” Doctor Who: Brand Regeneration?’, The Antenna Blog, 19 April 2010, http://blog.commarts.wisc. edu/2010/04/19/new-new-doctor-who-brand-regeneration/ (accessed 4 June 2010). 142.David Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (Oxford, 1995), p.

mid-1970s the authority figures whom the Doctor encounters were frequently managerial or administrative. A survey of Patrick Troughton’s three seasons as the Second Doctor would amply demonstrate the point. Thus, in the Second Doctor’s debut story, set in the human colony on the planet Vulcan, he spends most of his time parleying with the deputy governor, chief scientist and chief security officer. The trend continues in almost all stories from Troughton’s incumbency dealing with Earth in the

Reinette: she is constrained by her gender, and lonely in spite of all the extraordinary power and influence she wields as mistress to the King of France. And perhaps for the first time in Doctor Who’s television history the events of an episode serve to highlight the Doctor’s own lonely half-life. Although he too is a powerful being, who walks in eternity, all human existence is correspondingly fleeting for him and all intimacy with humans painfully transient. The contrast between the Doctor’s

observes that the problem which ethical philosophy originally addressed, namely how to live, cannot be reduced to questions of moral imperatives and laws.257 While Guillory rightly points out that the distinction has become thoroughly blurred in popular awareness, this seems reason to continue seeking to clarify the difference between ethics and morality, not to sidestep the problem. A Basis for Ethical Criticism As regards criteria for ethical judgment of the kind of ‘friendship’ that a text

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