Ivan Phillips - Once upon a time lord : the myths and stories of Doctor Who

Once Upon a Time Lord

Once Upon a Time Lord

The Myths and Stories of Doctor Who

Ivan Phillips

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First published in Great Britain 2020

Copyright Ivan Phillips, 2020

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ISBN: HB: 978-1-7883-1888-4

PB: 978-1-7845-3267-3

ePDF: 978-1-7883-1646-0

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Series: Who Watching

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For Mum,

in memory of Dad,

and with dimensionally transcendental love to Kate,

Molly, Grace and Eliza.

Contents

I would like to thank all those at Bloomsbury (and, initially, I.B. Tauris) who have ensured that this book didnt get lost in the space-time vortex, in particular my editors, Rebecca Barden and Philippa Brewster, my cover designer Charlotte Daniels, my original copy editor, Kate Reeves, and my project manager at Newgen, Kalyani. Thanks, too, to my many supportive, inspiring and endlessly knowledgeable colleagues at the University of Hertfordshire and beyond, and to my students, past, present, future: its a pleasure learning with you. An earlier version of the lycanthropic musings in Chapter 3 of this book appears in Sam George and Bill Hughes collection of essays In the Company of Wolves: Werewolves, Wolves and Wild Children (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020): thanks to Sam and Bill for permission to borrow from myself. Finally, thanks to my friends and family: without you, nothing would have been done, and nothing would have been worth doing. You remind me, as I keep moving, of all the people that I used to be.

As the Doctor knows only too well, and as successive companions have quickly discovered, setting coordinates does not guarantee a destination. You dont steer the TARDIS, Peter Capaldis Time Lord tells Bill Potts (Pearl Mackie) in the opening scene of Smile (2017), you negotiate with it. The still point between where you want to go and where you need to be, thats where she takes you. A book that sets its coordinates as the myths and stories of Doctor Who will likewise need to negotiate a still point between an apparently simple authorial intention and more complex critical needs. If story, for instance, is separated from myth for anything other than rhetorical convenience, then it becomes necessary to clarify the distinction. The most straightforward definition of myth, after all, is story, from ancient Greek muthos and Latin mythos , but this brings with it an array of alternatives, including not only narrative and plot but also speech and fable. If the subject here is the myths and stories of Doctor Who , which myths are being referred to (or which sense of myth), which stories (or sense of story) and, come to think of it, which Doctor Who ?

Taking a pragmatic view, the notion of story can be allowed to pass more or less unchallenged. Doctor Who is self-evidently preoccupied with storytelling Were all stories in the end, the Eleventh Doctor (Matt Barthess distinct adaptation of the word) might be seen as the myth of the realist novel. Ulysses achieved a subversive mythicization of Western life on a single day in 1904. Doctor Who , without the potential for a comparably unified vision or the impetus for a similarly uncompromising formal agenda, has nevertheless amounted to a mythicization of the cultural conditions out of which it is produced.

Using mythography to read Doctor Who is, in one sense, an intuitive response to a body of fantastic stories which must surely satisfy Joseph of writing on myth, necessarily partial, might be beneficial here.

The theorization of myth is old enough to have become mythical: There are no theories of myth itself, writes Robert

Yet for a subject that does not exist, studied as part of an academic discipline that should no longer exist, myth has been a remarkably energetic area of scholarship, not least since the beginning of the twentieth century. The roll call of commentators who have written on myth in the last hundred years or so is prodigious, and the variety of approaches that they have taken to the subject scarcely less so. This variety is surely a vital sign (myth and the theorization of myth might exist after all!) but it is also a problem, since it requires ruthless selectivity, the acceptance of contradiction, a capacity for synthesis or, as seems most likely, all three. If the emotional-mystical ideas of myth proposed by Lucien Lvy-Bruhl are to be utilized alongside the cooler, more cerebral readings of Claude Lvi-Strauss, or the ideological analyses of Roland Barthes alongside the sacred schemas of Mircea Eliade, how are such contrasting viewpoints to be reconciled within a survey of storytelling in Doctor Who ? Even a single writer can present starkly discrepant agendas, yet the early symbolic idealism of Ernst Cassirer is as resonant in the context of the Doctors adventures as the politically brooding mythography of his later writings.

Of course, Strenskis denial of the existence of myth is not really consonant with the obsolescence predicted by Tylor and Frazer: it represents, in fact, a negation of their thesis. Where they contended that myth would wither away as an archaic irrelevance in the age of scientific apotheosis, Strenski implies that it is only within the technologized environment of modernity that its full suggestive power is understood:

Myth is everything and nothing at the same time. It is the true story or a false one, revelation or deception, sacred or vulgar, real or fictional, symbol or tool, archetype or stereotype. It is either strongly structured and logical or emotional and pre-logical, traditional and primitive or part of contemporary ideology. Myth is about the gods, but often also the ancestors and sometimes certain men. It is Genesis and General Strike, Twentieth Century and Cowboy, Oedipus and Frankenstein

Myth survives into the modern world because of its sheer promiscuity of significance, its adaptability to new conditions. Even a comparatively strait-laced account like that of G. S. Kirkobsolete or meaningless by the demise of those ancient cultures into which its roots can be traced. On a much smaller scale, Doctor Who has survived its own mythic (or, more accurately, mythicized) origins, at the same time carrying them into its expanded present. The challenge is for criticism to acquire a similarly lithe durability.