A Few Notes on Race and Time Travel (Doctor Who)

The Whoniverse means time travel, and, at least some of the time, that means visiting the past.  The subject of race doesn’t come too often in this context since 1) including Mickey, Doctor Who has only had two companions of color, and Martha’s the only one that’s been to the past, and 2) the main characters on Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures travel very infrequently in time.  That being said, there are still some interesting episodes of note – Who today, and we’ll check out the spinoffs next week.

So, let’s talk Martha, shall we?  Series 3 has three stories set in the past, two of which are two-parters, plus a brief glimpse of our heroes in the ‘60s in “Blink.”  That’s a more-than-average emphasis on history, although consideration of race is mostly light.  I do like the show’s recognition that race relations aren’t a straight line that’s always marched forward (albeit slowly) towards progress.  Instead, matters have gone back and forth, as shown in “The Shakespeare Code.”  Martha, realizing she’s in 1599, asks, “Am I all right?  I’m not going to get carted off as a slave, am I?”, but the Doctor points out that the Elizabethan era isn’t as different from her time as she thinks.  The times aren’t exactly progressive – Shakespeare variously calls Martha a “delicious blackamoor lady,” an “Ethiop girl,” a “swarth,” a “Queen of Afric,” and “Dark Lady” – but Black people do exist in this era, and not solely as slaves.  At other times, however, the show goes too far in this kind of thinking.  There is no way I buy the racially-harmonious Hooverville of “Daleks Take Manhattan” / “Evolution of the Daleks,” where everyone accepts a sagacious Black man as their leader.  Part of it might be some writer disconnect between race in the UK versus the US, but glossing over historical fact in this way feels jarring.

The strongest racial ramifications for Martha occur in “Human Nature” / “The Family of Blood,” in which the Doctor is in hiding as a human without his real memories and Martha has to keep an eye out for him.  The TARDIS deposits them in a very casually-racist 1913, where Martha is forced to spend three months working as a maid in a prep school.  Between the outright racism (a student sneers, “With hands like those, how can you tell when something’s clean?”) and the patronizing remarks about both her position and assumed ignorance, (a number of adults, even the nice ones, lecture Martha on her “place,” and the Doctor-as-John-Smith in one scene talks to her like she’s an idiot and assumes she can’t tell the difference between fiction and fact,) Martha gets put through the wringer in this story.  And that’s before you add the aliens!  It’s a fairly unsanitized portrayal of the realities of racism in the Edwardian era, and after the pulled punches earlier in the season, I was pleased the see the show acknowledge this.

And clearly, that’s rough to watch.  It’s infuriating to see poised, intelligent Martha dismissed like that, especially when she just has to sit there and take it; the instances where she gets to push back are like a pressure-valve release, so satisfying.  With the heaviness of this story, I can understand why the show felt tempted to go easier in “The Shakespeare Code” and the Dalek two-parter.  Companions should expect to have their lives endangered by aliens wherever they go with the Doctor, but if Martha were to have every historical adventure be an exercise in racist assholery, that would be so unfair to her.  An alternative might to be keep her out of historicals all together, but that would just be ignoring the issue.  Overall, while there are problems (especially in the Depression-era story,) I think the show does a decent job of balancing racial complexities without making Martha’s time as a companion uniformly horrible for her.