Tom Steward, Independent Scholar | When Doctor Who first aired in 1963, the BBC’s principal design focus for the series was education (Chapman, 2006; Haining, 1990). Much of pilot episode ‘An Unearthly Child’ takes place inside secondary school classrooms and features montages of lessons. Prior to broadcast, two publicity stills of the Doctor’s original companions, schoolteachers…
Dr Marcus K Harmes, University of Southern Queensland | Early modern England, dated by historians as the period from c.1500 to 1700, permeates British television. The glittering and dramatic set pieces of Tudor, Elizabethan and Stuart history have long provided the dramatic substance of films and historical novels and, since the middle of the twentieth…
Deletion presents Episode 5, Doctor Who: “…definitely a madman with a box!” with Christopher Moore and Daniel Lewis at the console. “The human race, brainless sheep being fed on a diet of … mind you, have you still got that program where three people have to live with a bear? – The Ninth Doctor…
Elyce Helford | Though the present and future of post-millennial American science fiction television varies greatly from program to program, all are arguably driven by a melting-pot white ethic that reveals gains for white women and far less for people of color, especially African American women. While programming remains overwhelmingly produced by white men, white…
Sophia Davidson Gluyas, Deakin University | On the 4th of August 2013 it was announced that Peter Capalidi would play the 12th Doctor. It’s a good piece of casting and I know Capaldi will do a great job, only I no longer hear any profundity in the resounding question of the show. Doctor Who? Well,…
Sherryl Vint, University of California, Riverside | Scholarship on science fiction (sf) has long privileged print as the medium best suited to convey what is conventionally regarded as the genre’s key quality, the effect of cognitive estrangement. A term coined by Darko Suvin in his extremely influential Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, cognitive estrangement describes a…