Worlds Within Worlds: The Secrets of Series 9 (Part 1)

Guest contributor Janine Rivers explores the theme of worlds within worlds throughout Series 9.

There is a strange tension watching Doctor Who in its early days. On one level, it’s clearly the show that we are watching today and more: the very thing that allowed that show to come into being, and the key concepts at their ‘purest’ and most straightforward. On another, it’s the least Doctor Who any Doctor Who story has ever been – a narrative in which no one is quite sure what Doctor Who means, and where what we recognise as familiar is treated as strange and alien. Over time, the show came to change through self-familiarity, and was able to explore new themes and ideas, closely tied to the role of television and often to society as a whole, with the show being unafraid to comment on major social and political events.

One thing was, however, visibly understood from the very beginning. The tale would begin as two schoolteachers stepped into a police box and found a world greater and more impossible than the one outside it. And not a gateway, like Narnia: the world inside the police box was the TARDIS. Everything they saw until they stepped back outside on a new landscape was squeezed between those blue, wooden walls.

These days, that notion is wrapped up in the implications of culture. If the TARDIS is a world of its own – and, thus, contains its own culture – then the act of stepping inside the TARDIS can be likened to cultural exploration. Not only is it a strange and unfamiliar world, it’s also one we weren’t expecting to see. We thought we understood the nature of the blue box, and we thought we understood where it came from, what it was like, and what its purpose was. In actual fact, we were too busy walking past it without sparing it a thought to consider the possibility that there was ever more to it: that it was ever bigger on the inside. Sound familiar?

Throughout this analysis, I will be exploring how the theme of ‘worlds within worlds’ recurred more strongly than ever over the course of the last series, episode by episode, and will almost inevitably end up reaching the conclusion that Steven Moffat’s Doctor Who is a wonderful thing, so take that as a trigger warning if you have strong feelings to the contrary.

Revolting Sewers

The Witch’s Familiar goes off on a bit of a tangent from The Magician’s Apprentice – and not one, I should I add, I have any problem with – and explores the social system of the planet Skaro. This is an interesting prospect. Dalek history is confusing, and that’s speaking generously. Moving from a story about genetic purity to one where the Daleks are gathered in parliament raises quite a few questions, and I always get the impression that we’ve missed large swathes of social change on Skaro (the fact that the Daleks don’t have an imagined glorious past to look to as most fascist societies do might go a way to explain why it can look so weird with its inconsistencies, and The Witch’s Familiar really is the height of Skaro as a fascist society, a kind of ‘what would happen if Nazism became business-as-usual and Hitler reached old age?’ story).

Yet social change does somehow seem antithetical to the Daleks, doesn’t it? This isn’t least because, well, the Daleks don’t change. They’re still close to their original designs, and as Victory of the Daleks explains, varying too much from the ideological/biological concept of a Dalek means not being recognised as one at all. To be Dalek, the Dalek must be unchanging.

This worldview, The Witch’s Familiar elaborates, is embedded not just into their minds, but into their bodies. Daleks are designed to carry on living: to continue to exist just as they continue to exterminate (and of course, one necessitates the other; the Daleks must be able to kill). But from this forms, eventually, a social structure, and it’s easy to imagine that the development of Dalek society has really come from the toll of time and the impact of having half the population turn to sewerage.

The Dalek society isn’t unlike our own: they have order, even at their most morally repellent – and, rather tragically, a class system is part and parcel of this. The Daleks in the sewers, due to their physical condition, are treated as an underclass, oppressed not just socially but geographically, with the ground itself pushing them down and stifling them out. This is a culture, hidden within Skaro by those in power.

And what does the Doctor do? Why, he comes along and empowers the underclass to rise up above the Daleks gliding along in their bronze cases through their shiny white corridors and, using the geographical isolation the Daleks have imposed on them, literally and figuratively destabilise Dalek society. This is, in his true anarchic fashion, how the Doctor responds to discovering worlds within worlds: not as their savour, but as the one who catalyses the process of social change. And it’s that social change – that colossal shift in the class system of Skaro – that ends up being the Daleks’ demise.

Before Before the Flood

Whilst the central conceit of Before the Flood is going back to before the first half of the story took place, there’s a bit more wiggle room to be found. After O’Donnell’s death, the Doctor and Bennett travel back in time involuntarily, and are forced to stay out of their past selves’ way, a la Father’s Day, approaching events from a different angle.

This tells us not just that there’s more to any moment in time (a world within a world), but that we can only understand this through experience and greater knowledge. Bennett, for instance, watches as O’Donnell stands and smiles while the others are talking. His past self, however, is oblivious. Whilst this is only one moment in time, there is more than one perspective inside it. Time, just like culture, varies in its nature through the individual perspective. Sadly, I can’t go much further on this point, because I’m just not that sold, based on the rest of the story, that Toby Whithouse actually thought this deeply about it.

Infinite Lifespan, Finite Memory

But time and perspective are both intrinsically linked with memory, bringing us onto Ashildr.

Ashildr is, by her nature, bigger on the inside. Within an ordinary, limited human body, she carries the key to the infinite, and an unexpectedly profound memory. Of course, whilst profound, her memory isn’t infinite, and she records her memories in books (until they become stories – familiar?). Ashildr is more than she seems, and through all the live she’s lived, has become the sum of the cultures she’s lived in. Ashildr, therefore, represents the cultures within a culture. But she also represents something else.

There’s a very thin line between multiculturalism (a culture made of a number of tangible cultures within it, the mark of each one clear in a unique way) and a-culturalism (being of no culture at all). In The Woman Who Lived, Ashildr is in a more or less multicultural shape: she is defined by the vivid confusion of all the cultures she’s lived through, and is recovering from the losses of each one. But by Hell Bent, outwardly at least, she is completely a-cultural, having lived so long that the entire concept of culture is obsolete – like some modern societies, her scope of knowledge and conflicting beliefs (contrasting theories about the Hybrid, for instance) are so broad that they don’t really have a culture anymore. Ashildr, in a way, represents the development of the very idea of culture over time: she begins as one thing, defined by one time, then takes on the burden of the past, and then relinquishes that burden and the concept that she ever had a culture altogether. She becomes Me, unable to express herself in any other terms than who she is to herself.

I Just Want To Live Here

How could I go on without addressing The Zygon Invasion/The Zygon Inversion? This is almost undoubtedly the most obvious world within a world in Series Nine – that of the Zygons. Yes, it functions as an allegory, but even taken literally it’s a non-metaphorical culture hidden within our own: a real, inflexible story about a flood of migrants becoming a part of our society.

This, maybe, is the most significant story of Series Nine. Primarily, it’s about integration: the Zygons have developed a biological mechanism to literally integrate into a society and conform to what it looks like to be a human. And if we are all vehicles of our culture, the Zygon itself is, once again, a culture within a culture.

There are some problems with the story’s approach: the overwhelming message of the second half is that Zygons should integrate so that they’ll be accepted, which appears to actively discourage multiculturalism for the sake of social harmony (and the Doctor wonders how radicalisation comes about). This clashes a bit with the anarchic Doctor of The Witch’s Familiar who was willing to catalyse the destabilisation of a whole society to empower the oppressed, but hey, they were the Daleks, and this story’s got a joke about benefits in it.

What, then, does this tell us? If the show is telling stories about worlds within worlds and cultures within cultures, it must be starting to actively engage with the central ‘bigger on the inside’ concept. The series itself is willing to explore new worlds and new cultures, and only form judgement about them once it’s seen inside the box. Today, we’ve explored class structure, social change and integration. What could be left? If you enjoyed this – and if you’ve got far enough to read that, then thank you – join me next time as I explore what happens when we start to take this concept to Gallifrey, the long way round.