More Notes on Race and Time Travel (Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures)

The Whoniverse’s spinoffs, with their lack of TARDISes, travel in time far less than the parent show does, but there’s still the odd time-travel episode here and there.  This offers a few more opportunities to explore race when 21^st-century characters of color visiting the past.

On Torchwood, “Captain Jack Harkness” finds Jack and Tosh transported to 1941.  Tosh, who’s of Japanese descent, is lucky to be in Wales in January rather than the U.S. in December, but it’s still a thoroughly-unnerving experience.  As soon as she realizes when they are, she gets anxious, and rightfully so.  “Jap” trips easily off of people’s tongues, and Tosh’s natural out-of-placeness from being displaced in time is interpreted by those around her as traitorous behavior.  She’s quickly suspected of being a spy, and without Jack asserting her loyalty to Britain, things might have turned very ugly for her.  For me, one of the hardest-hitting moments of the episode is when she worriedly asks Jack what will happen to her if they can’t get back, and Jack replies, “I’ll take care of you.”  Yes, it’s one friend looking out for another, but it’s also one friend acknowledging that the other will experience additional danger solely because of her race and that he, due to his privilege as a white person, will need to protect her.  Very sad, but very honest.

With The Sarah Jane Adventures, we have two PoC of different races with separate time-travel experiences, which are interesting to compare.  Rani visits the past twice and gets “exotic foreigner” reactions both times.  When she crashes a mid-century village in “The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith,” she causes quite a stir (to be fair, that’s partly because she’s wearing pants.  After she leaves, a villager exclaims, “Can that really be the fashion in the Punjab?”)  Rani has a bemused/weary acceptance of shocking the locals, replying, “Yes, hello.  Ethnic person in the ‘50s.”  Her other jaunt into the past is in “Lost Time,” where she, Clyde, and Sarah Jane are sent to different points in history.  Rani meeta Jane Grey, under the guise of being her new lady-in-waiting, and while one of Jane’s servants doubts the “foreigner” can be trusted, Rani uses the “mysteries of the East” thing to her advantage.  She plays off any out-of-time faux pas as Indian customs, and Jane, fascinated by but ignorant of Asia, easily buys her excuses.

It disappointed me that Clyde was the only one not to visit the ‘50s in “The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith,” and I was glad he finally got to time travel in “Lost in Time.”  Clyde is sent to the WWII era, where he and an evacuated boy thwart a group of Nazis planning an attack – he’s tossed right into the deep end, isn’t he?  I’ve already mentioned the main race-related scene here, when the Nazi commander calls him a Negro, and Clyde in turn amazingly calls the Nazis “a gang of bullies picking on others for what they look like” who will lose the war due to their “blind, stupid prejudice.”  (I love it so much.)  But what really strikes me is what I think may be the reason Clyde only time travels once, and then only to WWII.  I wonder if the writers were aware that, as a Black boy, Clyde would experience harsher, blunter racism than Rani would as a South Asian and wanted to be sure that racism came from obvious bad guys (Nazis, people.)  When 1950s villagers gawk at Rani, their exoticizing is more about ignorance than malice, but if Clyde had walked into the same crowd, he would’ve likely had a far colder welcome.  It’s ugly enough for a Nazi call him a Negro.  If he’d had that contempt from one those pleasant villagers?  From one of Sarah Jane’s parents, maybe?  Way worse, and harder for Clyde to push back against.  If the show really had that kind of understanding and planned Clyde’s one time-travel adventure accordingly, it shows a pretty unflinching awareness of history and race relations.