The Land of Metafiction

Like Sedric, I am uncommonly interested in the metafictional aspects of the TV show Doctor Who.  Pretty much every show with an audience has metafictional aspects to a greater or lesser degree.  In particular there are really interesting metafictional aspects to both Star Trek and Star Wars that can be differentiated sharply from Doctor Who's approach to metafiction.

One of the unusual aspects of Doctor Who is that it has an extremely flexible central concept.  The basic concept of the main character is that she can be anyone and go anywhere in time and space.  That's not really a compelling or dramatic hook for a long-running TV series.

This means that most of what makes Doctor Who what it is has to be, necessarily, metafictional.  Occasionally an attempt is made to "nerf" the story engine - for instance by confining the lead character to present-day earth - but these attempts never seem to last very long or to be deployed very consistently.  When the Third Doctor was sent to earth he lasted for three stories, for instance, before being sent to a parallel universe.  The next season a deus ex machina decided to send him to an alien planet.  Occasionally, as at the end of the sixteenth season, an attempt is made to reduce his control over his time machine.  Typically these attempts are so short-lived that it's easy to forget they happen.

What is essential, immutable, about the show?  Well, the lead character is British.  Probably that's unexceptional to British viewers, but it's always been a defining trait of the character for me.  It's never been hard for me to accept the show as being alien, and it's not because we don't have rock quarries here in America.  She travels around in a Police Box, which used to be a happenstance eccentric quirk, the first and most obvious accommodation to the budget.  Wherever it goes it will look out of place.  Its home is not some alien world where everyone wears silly hats, but a British junkyard in 1963.

And then, well, there's the name of the character.  This is a matter of some dispute, of some tension.  When I was first watching the show it was considered the mark of a neophyte to refer to the main character as "Doctor Who".  It was a shibboleth.  Acceptance of the internal ludic conventions was taken as a mark of inner knowledge.

To this day fans who come to the show through the new material are overwhelmed and intimidated by the show's vast history.  They see it as a knowledge to be obtained the same way London cabbies obtain The Knowledge.  Having obtained a greater-than-usual proportion of The Knowledge myself (though there are always people who know more than me), I don't see it that way.

I am delighted when new fans come to the show.  I am delighted by the opportunities presented by Chibnall's run of the show.  This is not a book with new chapters being written, but a playground, a playground that should be open to all.  Ignorance is no barrier to be overcome but a gift to be celebrated.  The bulk of "continuity" is there to be picked up, examined as a jeweler would with a loupe, and discarded as, after all, only paste.

It is partly in this spirit that I refer to the main character, whenever possible, as "Doctor Who".  I also, however, do this because it reflects a different sort of knowledge, a knowledge no character in-universe has admitted to possessing, which is in-universe the deepest and most impenetrable of secrets, but which every viewer knows from the moment they turn it on.

Because what, possibly, could the Doctor's true name be other than "Doctor Who"?  Theta Sigma?  Some unpronounceable glyph?  Nonsense.  No other name could be acceptable, and the only reason it is such a closely-guarded secret is because of what we, the viewers, would lose if we knew it.  We as viewers, as fans, know the Doctor's true name, and her true nature.  We define that nature, in a million little deuterocanonical absurdities, year after year.  The actual community of fans is often petty, small-minded, and dull, but the beacon of possibility represented by the character's narratively transcendent nature, by the disjunction between the character's in-universe name and her name in the show title, this is at the heart of so much of the best of what the show, and its fans, have accomplished.