Instructor: Stuart Parker
Course Objectives
The original Doctor Who series is an enormous, ambivalent archive spanning twenty-six years of television, some of which contained more than fifty individual episodes of the series. There are a few approaches a course might take in mining this corpus. One might explain the evolution of the series over twenty-six years, the changes it made, the ground it broke and the way it changed its contents and themes over time. Or, one might use the course as a mirror on which the history of Britain and the larger world is reflected, tracing shifts in politics, culture and society.
This course treats the years 1975 to 1979 as the golden age of the series and uses earlier and later episodes to explain and contextualize the show’s golden age when Tom Baker’s increasingly eccentric Doctor traveled the universe with a robot dog and a series of increasingly feminist companions. It examines some of the unique features of the show during that period, especially the involvement of Douglas Adams, author of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as script editor and frequent scriptwriter.
Each of the course’s thirteen lectures treats a contiguous series of four to eight episodes and discusses the major themes of the episode and related texts and situates each storyline within the larger themes of the series.
Difficulty Level
This course’s lecture content requires no prior specialized knowledge and is based on general knowledge widely available to any high school graduate who keeps up with the news. The one challenge element of the course is the optional reading where, if students fully embrace it, includes some tough theoretical texts from the twentieth century as well as classics from the Ancient World and Middle Ages. This reading is not required but the question/answer part of each class is designed for students to clarify the meaning and context of what they have read.
Texts
At the beginning of the course, students will receive a series of Dropbox links to download each of the videos and readings we will be discussing. This includes episodes of the TV series and two of the books as well as maps, book chapters, articles and other video content.
Class Schedule
We will be meeting twice a week on Zoom at 5:30pm Pacific (8:30pm Eastern, 1:30am Greenwich) on Mondays and Wednesdays. Participants will also be subscribed to a Google group and a Facebook group to carry on discussion outside of class time. In all, the class will have thirteen episodes. Classes will start on Wednesday, March 3rd.
| Date | Doctor | Lecture | Episodes and Optional Reading |
| March 3rd | IV | Sherlock Holmes and other character archetypes | The Talons of Weng Chiang 1-6 |
| March 8th | III | Long-term themes: feminism, fascism and contagion | Inferno 1-7
Eichmann in Jerusalem, excepts |
| March 10th | IV | Memories of the Second World War | Genesis of the Daleks 1-6 |
| March 15th | IV
IV |
The Golden Age of Dr. Who: Douglas Adams and the Second Wave | The Pirate Planet 1-4
The Stones of Blood 1-4 |
| March 17th | I | Odysseus, Saint Brendan and Taliesin and pre-modern story structures | The Keys of Marinus 1-7
“Life of St. Brendan,” excerpts “The Odyssey,” excerpts |
| March 22nd | III | The ethics of imperial decline | The Mutants 1-4
“The Dandy Hero,” stuartparker.ca |
| March 24th | IV | The Prime Directive and Margaret Mead | The Time Meddler 1-4 |
| March 29th | VI | Doctor Who and dystopian prescience | Vengeance on Varos 1-2 |
| March 31st | IV
V |
The postmodern critique and its critique | Logopolis 1-4
Castrovalva 1-4 “Castrovalva,” stuartparker.ca |
| April 5th | IV | Narcissism and personality disorder monsters | The Face of Evil 1-4 |
| April 7th | IV | Walter Benjamin, the Angel of History and the return of Douglas Adams | The City of Death 1-4
“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reconstruction,” Walter Benjamin |
| April 12th | IV | The Marxist episode | The Sunmakers 1-4 |
| April 14th | VII
VII |
Cosmic evil | The Curse of Fenric 1-4
Survival 1-3 Time Bandits |
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