Troubles With Time

Of all the episodes Tomorrow’s Worlds: the Unearthly History of Science Fiction presented by Dominic Sandbrook, ‘Time’ has been the most disappointing. Perhaps this is because Dominic is a historian by discipline. He exudes enthusiasm at the possibility of visiting people and events in history, safe in the knowledge perhaps that these are firmly set in our history books with no unpleasant surprises. Meanwhile jaunts to the future represent an unending list of unknowns. Perhaps this is even more unsettling for a historian than the rest of us? The future is full of dystopic possibilities, and if history has taught us anything it is that that civilisations fall, stability crumbles and certainties begin to fade. We are left with the feeling that we should enjoy the present because the future can only get worse. Dominic suggests that our present is indeed starting to ‘feel’ more and more like one of those unpleasant futures that we seem to be sleep walking towards.

My impression was that he struggled to find enough material to talk about. Having explored the best known time travel stories of film and television he had to resort to science fiction stories that happened to depict future society, usually for the worst. This felt a little like padding to me and I think resulted from looking at time machines as variations of the same beast. In fact they have different functions. The TARDIS was in effect a magic door, something that transported the protagonists to strange places and dangerous situations. HG Wells’ The Time Machine compressed time so that its enormous power and influence could be comprehended and the importance of evolution demonstrated. The DeLorean was a device to put a son on a par with his parents in a Shakespearean like farce.   

Dominic started the episode discussing many of the best known time travel classics of TV and cinema, in particular Doctor Who.  The TARDIS being something that looked like a common police box that was bigger on the inside was of course a mind blowing concept that came out of the sheer practicality of being able to move a recognisable prop easily while still having a studio-sized interior. In fact the original plan was to have the Chameleon circuit function so that the TARDIS would change its appearance for each new location, but time and money considerations prevailed (luckily) and we ended up with one of the most iconic objects in British culture. But it was never just a time (and space) machine. In the original classic series there were two sets of doors at either end of a porch leading to the interior. Rather like a church, the porch represented the transition from the profane to the sacred. It emphasised the refuge, the ‘holy place’ of pure science, that was the inside of the TARDIS compared the profane outside Universe with all its evils and dangers. In the current series the TARDIS doors look rather like those of a shed.

Steven Moffat suggested in the episode that what made the Doctor special as a Time Travelling adventurer was that he  actually lives inside his TARDIS. Personally, I think there is a lot more to it than that.  During the classic era in particular, when the Doctor seemed to have very little control over his destination, on more than one occasion the TARDIS made the important decisions regarding the Doctor’s destinations and battles, often having parked itself in a location that made it impossible for the Doctor to use it as an escape route. This was a definite modus operandi. For example, in The Time Meddler the TARDIS parked itself below the high tide mark in order to be under water during the limited window of opportunity that the Doctor and crew had for escaping in it. In The Robots of Death it parked itself inside one of the sand hoppers of a Sandminer (extracting the minerals of on a ‘Dune’ like planet) just prior to its being filled with sand. Often it was enough that suspicious locals prevented the Doctor from having access to TARDIS. All of this suggests that the TARDIS is using the Doctor. The space-time entity at its heart, selects the injustice or threat that is to be tackled, then launches its resident Time Lord symbiont at it. Not for nothing was the episode where the TARDIS is personified in the body of a woman (Idris) called The Doctor’s Wife.

So, if we follow this line of reasoning, it suggests a far more alien Doctor than we humans are capable of seeing. He is not merely a variant on humanity, but something far stranger, far more incomprehensible. He is in fact a form of gestalt being, but it is a form that is difficult for us to understand. The Doctor’s function is both to action those crises the TARDIS selects and act as understandable interface to those sentient, mostly humanoid, species that they encounter. By extension therefore, the TARDIS isn’t just a time machine.