On March 19th, Lewis Gordon came across this article by Mel Perez on the surprising development of a Black female incarnation of The Doctor, the Alien Protagonist of the 57-year science fiction television series. He was struck by these two paragraphs in Perez’s article:
I’ve been watching Doctor Who since 2005 and I’ve found some aspect of each Doctor to relate to even though they were all white seemingly straight males and I am a black, queer woman. The 13th Doctor is a woman but she’s still white, keeping up the tradition of white Doctors since the inception of the show. I chose to focus on us both being women, but I still couldn’t fully see myself in her.
The latest episode, Fugitive of the Judoon, introduced us to Ruth, a black woman caught up in a dangerous situation. The question of who Ruth really was plagued both the Doctor and the audience. Thankfully, the episode didn’t keep us in suspense for too long. Ruth broke not only the glass in the episode but also the audience’s expectations of her identity. When she emerged and introduced herself as the Doctor complete with the TARDIS, we were all in as much shock as the 13th Doctor. Unlike the Doctor, my shock quickly morphed into elation.
Struck by Perez’s remarks, Gordon posted the piece on Facebook and twitter on March 19, 2020 preceded by the statement: “And for Black men like me, who shared this elation….”
This stimulated responses from various followers. The exchange with one in particular, Dr. Sakena Young-Scaggs, is offered here in revised form as it may be of interest to readers of this blog series.
For anyone not familiar with Doctor Who, it is a British television science fiction series (with two cinematic films, a U.S. television film, and a cartoon movie), many radio broadcasts, and novels) in which the protagonist is not from Earth, travels through time and space in a device or ship in the form of a British Police Call Box called Time-and-Relative-Dimensions-in-Space or T.A.R.D.I.S
SAKENA YOUNG-SCAGGS: They had her in two episodes this season. I was elated too!
LEWIS R. GORDON: She is exactly the kind of Doctor I had hoped for in some of my imagined scripts. It’ll be great if comics or novels are already under way telling her stories, especially as hers is a prequel to the Doctors known up to this point. Additionally, to make the point clear, there is the initial little girl Doctor who was also Black. We don’t know if she was herself a regeneration, but at least in the Gallefreyan history her regeneration was the first, and it is Tecteun’s harnessing her DNA over time that transformed the Shobogans into Time Lords. This makes her in our racial language Black signification not second-tier but, as the author argues, central. There is also no need to prove her queerness since, by human standards, The Doctor is queer since she/he/they/it transcends and paradoxically shares our various standpoints and manifestations.
I must add that I lamented the first season of the new Doctor, not because of Jodi Whittaker’s performance, but because of the terrible scripts (except for the King James episode). The 2nd season is better, but it was pushing an “OK” in my book until the episode introducing this earlier Black woman incarnation. I must say I figured out she was at least a Time Lord from the moment her husband was trying to find a way for her to retrieve a watch or time piece. It harkened to my favorite episode from the Tennant years (“Human Nature,” 2007) and others such as The Master’s regeneration into the most spirited version (see “Utopia,” “The Sound of the Drums,” and “Last of the Time Lords,” 2007). It was clear that finding this device would reveal her to be a Time Lord. What a great twist for her to be The Doctor. Her use of a gun also was a cool homage to Bush Mamma (1975), one of my favorite Haile Gerima films. Remember that Black revolutionary women from anti-colonial movements in Africa to the Black Panther Party to #BlackLivesMatter all take on police violence. The Judoon are an intergalactic police force that, as we see in “Fugitive of the Judoon,” are brutal and execute anyone who “resists” as police claim when they kill Blacks in the United States, the UK, Canada, and many other countries.
The episode also rewrites The Doctor. One thing is that she turns out not technically to be a Time Lord but in fact something else and something more. This thing about timelessness raises so many philosophical questions. For one, it would mean she is a deity. It also raises a bunch of Heideggerian questions—for example, could it be that the 12 regenerations story was told to her and imposed on the Time Lords to make them not-gods and to make her at least existentially unaware being one or, in a recognizable way to us, human?
But even more, is The Master’s rage jealousy and ressentiment or, more interestingly, a realization that he may simply also be The Doctor? Given the addition of timelessness, why not converging spatiotemporal pluralities with the power of stasis? In other words, couldn’t the lies—technologically implemented—also have split The Doctor into a negative version as hinted at in The Valeyard (in The Trial of a Timelord, Season 23 in 1986 of the Classic Series)? If this is correct, wouldn’t The Master be even more revolted to learn he/she/they/it is The Doctor and, worse, instead of the initial regenerations an in fact de-generation with the power of regeneration? I don’t know if that will be a future plot twist, but we will no doubt learn since, as we know, The Master/Missy always comes back.
I had no idea you were a Whovian, too!
Yes, the scripts and storylines have been quite disappointing and lackluster. I understand there is an arc Chris Chibnall is trying to loop back to. “The Timeless Child” returns to the original series, for example.
The presence the Kente and cultural artifacts layer this Doctor’s incarnation were hard not to appreciate by the way.
Yes, I noticed the Kente Cloth shirt she wears beneath her vest and blazer.
I’m an unashamed Whovian. I began watching it in 1971 when I immigrated to the USA. It used to be aired on PBS. I subsequently purchased whatever missing stuff I could, including the very first episode, “An Unearthly Child” (November 23, 1963). One of the cool things about Doctor Who is that it is actually science fiction. Most of what passes off as science fiction is actually technology fiction. Unfortunately too many people don’t know the distinction between science and technology. Many people are technicians today without knowing the science behind the technology. Doctor Who explores the science through which the technology makes sense, and it raises, always, the question of responsibility for science and technology. It is a show that doesn’t separate science from ethics. This is one of the reasons why it had to—to the chagrin of the racist, sexist, and homophobic geeks—address questions of class, gender, race, and sexuality, in addition to climate change, authoritarianism, totalitarianism, etc. This is ironic since it is a British series. As with the USA, the imperialists the protagonists fight against are in fact the societies in which these programs are made. It should be obvious, in the end, that constant imperial efforts of the right bring life on the brink of, if not already (as we are experiencing in the USA with COVID-19), disaster.
That is one of the reasons why the haters have been attacking the series. They fail to see how uncritical they are of their own societies in which faith in technology, obsession with father figures (whether abusive like Trump or loving like FDR or Obama) elide important possibilities of imagination. The contemporary haters just want a boy’s club with a father or Uncle guiding them through the universe with pretty girls in tow. It’s a breath of fresh air that this series is being rebooted into what are its core elements of ethics, science, technology, politics, and, when done well, excellent writing.
The notion of a Deific Doctor embodied female and Black, which is the origin of all Gallefrayan, … I was not prepared for and then the consistent protector of Earth … yes, the universe but a persistent call to earth care resonates with an entirely new read on the linage of the Doctor before what we know as the traditional regeneration.
I don’t like the idea of The Doctor being a deity, since, as you may already know from my writings, I’m against deus ex machina and theodicean resolutions for reasons that would take too much time to articulate here. Another thing. The current turn of events will require addressing the problem of The Doctor’s having false memories challenged by echoes of truth. The episode that always stood out for me in this regard from the Classic Series is The Brain of Morbius (1976, Season 13, episode 19). Morbius was a Time Lord who had challenged The Doctor to a mind battle. As Morbius was out of his regenerations (reduced to a patch-work of various species similar to Frankenstein’s Creature with only his Gallifreyan brain remaining) and believed he was older, he thought it would be a piece of cake to defeat The Doctor. But, as it turned out, The Doctor had more incarnations than the four known up to that point in the series. Here is the famous scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51a1hoSn4uY. Morbius was defeated before the subsequent others were manifested. The turn of events in the current series is actually consistent with that story, which is great!
My grandmother used to tell me that God was a “Black Woman, Chile!” The first epiphany as the episode progressed was the origin story of the Doctor as a Black Woman named Ruth gripped me and would not let go.
I am not merely suggesting theodicean resolutions. Instead the importance of an origin story with an embedded inclusive imago Die provides potentiated hope to Black Women. Thus, following the Doctor Who narrative arc it offers Black women a place beyond the side kick spot in the universe previously offered.
Perhaps even an imaginative variation of Sankofa Narrative corrective not merely to go back to fetch it but to go back and correct it!
I see your point about hope, but we would have to discuss that another time. I also have problems with the need for people to look like us in order to have hope, love, or respect. That is one of the reasons why I had initiated my post with “for Black men like me, who shared this elation….” I don’t need The Doctor to be a Black man, although it is clear from the episode that there were incarnations in the form of Black men. I would, however, be adamant about The Doctor’s blackness under circumstances where the claim is that The Doctor cannot be Black. In the end, it is important that The Doctor is ethical or virtuous and an agent of liberation. That is compatible with The Doctor having many morphological manifestations, including possibly non-humanoid ones.
I was thinking in terms of Womanist Ethics being ground not in male or female terms but instead as a praxeological ethic of care for “entire people male and female” and, in The Doctor’s case, beyond.
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Some other readers wrote in under pseudonyms. Here is some of that exchange, with the readers in bold print:
Reader 1: Yesssss!!! Whooop whoop. I stopped watching after viewing a few episodes with Peter Capaldi; just didn’t have the spark! And Matt Smith was tolerable when Amy Pond was his companion. So excited about the new Doctor!!!
It is. I hated the Matt Smith and the Peter Capaldi versions. They worked too hard to be exciting, although there is one Capaldi episode I liked a lot because of the complicated scientific and philosophical challenges it raised: “Heaven Sent” (2015). Here is a clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sl9pTDK8PAk. Beyond that, the only other thing I liked was The Missy (the female incarnation of The Master). I hated what was done with the Black lesbian companion Bill. But those episodes set the foundations for what is now the dawn of what could be a genuine 21st century adaptation of Doctor Who.
As I also teach philosophy of cinema, race in film, horror, and science fiction, I kept up with the entire series, as it is one of the few genuinely science fiction series that addresses the issues I discussed with Sakena Young-Scaggs. There are some other series I tried to engage but just found them so bad that I moved on. There are some that are not science fiction but address race in cinema and fantasy in brilliant ways. The recent HBO Watchmen (2019) series hit the mark, for instance. Jo Martin’s Doctor, however, is simply superb. She exemplifies so much of what we are looking for in The Doctor. Perhaps also my having known Jamaican women like her (she is a Brit of Jamaican descent) adds so many allegorical elements. The Doctor, after all, is ultimately fluid and diasporic across the pluriverse. In short, I’m digging this development.
Reader 1: And I’m just in awe that one of my favorite philosophers digs Doctor Who!!!
Glad to hear I stand among your favorites. Among the things I love about Doctor Who is that, despite its British origins, the show is ultimately anti-nationalist. Viewers outside of the UK may not realize the significance of Jo Martin playing The Doctor, especially given the racism of Brexit and the historical situation of the Windrush Generation and the earlier, complicated history of the Sharpe-led Rebellion in 1832 and its part in the eventual outlawing of enslavement and trafficking across the British Empire (although, as we know, the situation is dialectical since Asian enslavement through problematic contracts followed). I had at times wondered what a script with The Doctor having experienced racial enslavement and degradation would lead to in understanding The Doctor’s commitment to fight against forces of enslavement, disempowerment, degradation, etc. This development is a golden opportunity to bring such to the fore.
Reader 2, TOD KINGTON (permission to use name granted): So affirming. Especially when you’re talking about all my favorite bits and episodes. I’ve always known The Doctor is queer, but I couldn’t get at it. Thank you.
Yes, The Doctor is, as Sara Ahmed would argue, and has always been out-of-line—that is, queer. I have argued in my writings that an unfortunate element in much of what is called western philosophy has been an effort to “de-queer” human reality. There is the greater philosophical consideration of existence as something queer as it is a deviation from Being. The Doctor is a deviation from the suppression of freedom/queerness/contingency of existence (which is why I’m worried about this deification thing). I am glad the queer dimension of The Doctor is explicitly coming to the fore.
Sakena Young-Scaggs
Dr. Sakena Young-Scaggs is an Honors Faculty Fellow at Barret Honors College of Arizona State University’s Tempe Campus. She is an unyielding voice on race, gender, and social justice. After completing both her MDiv and STM at Boston University, she worked and served in Higher Education for over a decade as what she calls an “academic midwife” lending to her contention that we must birth new life every day in the academy and nurture students toward their own success. She has previously served as the Associate Dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University and as the Associate Protestant University Chaplain at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. “Rev. Sys,” as called by students, is an ordained Itinerant Elder in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and holds leadership positions in her denomination and the local church. Her Dissertation “Afrofuturism, Womanist Phenomenology, and the Black Imagination: A Liberative Revisioning of Black Humanity” examines the potentiated hope of visioning African Futures through a Womanist Phenomenological analysis. Dr. Young-Scaggs is a recipient of the ASU IRC Doctoral Enrichment Fellowship, where her work focuses on the intersections of gender, race, and social justice employing ethics, philosophical, and womanist methodologies. She is a member of the American Academy of Religion, the National Women’s Studies Association, and The Interdisciplinary Coalition of North American Phenomenologists, as wells as, serves on several community-based organizations and boards.
Lewis Gordon
Lewis R. Gordon is Chairperson of the Awards Committee of the Caribbean Philosophical Association and Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Global Affairs and Head of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut. He is also Honorary President of the Global Center for Advanced Studies and Distinguished Scholar at The Most Honourable PJ Patterson Centre for Africa-Caribbean Advocacy at The University of the West Indies, Mona. He is the author of many books, including, most recently, Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization (Routledge, 2021); Fear of Black Consciousness (Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the USA, and Penguin-UK 2022); Black Existentialism and Decolonizing Knowledge: Writings of Lewis R. Gordon, edited by Rozena Maart and Sayan Dey (Bloomsbury, 2023); and “Not Bad for an N—, No?”/ «Pas mal pour un N—, n'est-ce pas? » (Daraja Press, 2023).
