Everything New is Old Again?: Retroactive Representation in Fandom

Today, I’m staying home for Peter Davison.

(Spoilers for series 12 of Doctor Who, as well as Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and season 3 of Black Lightning.)

This is a topic I first wrote about after I saw Rogue One, but it came to me again with the most recent season of Doctor Who. Honestly, the thought occurred to me as soon as Jo Martin’s version of the intrepid Time Lord was introduced partway through the season, but I held off on revisiting the subject until getting confirmation on my “Nth Doctor” speculations in the season finale.

(Note: on the Doctor Who side of things, I’ll be using pronouns as I have before on this subject. I refer to particular regenerations of the Doctor or other Time Lords by their identified gender – i.e. “she/her” for the Thirteenth Doctor – and use “they/them” for speaking of the character as a whole, across all their lives.)

Quick recap: in “Fugitive of the Judoon,” Jodie Whittaker’s Thirteenth Doctor meets another version of herself, the Nth Doctor. While Thirteen automatically assumes the Nth Doctor must be a regeneration from her future, since she has no memory of ever having been this version, the Nth Doctor has no memory of Thirteen either and insists that Thirteen is the one from the future, not her. Most popular speculation on the subject took the Nth Doctor’s side in that debate, assuming she was the Doctor from the series’ distant past, possibly even an incarnation prior to William Hartnell’s First Doctor, and her existence was somehow erased from memory or undone/rewritten altogether.

Fast forward to the season finale, “The Timeless Children,” in which we get a little elucidation care of a mindbending trip through the Matrix narrated by the Master. There, it’s both heavily implied that the Nth Doctor is in fact an earlier, likely pre-One version and explicitly confirmed that the Doctor has had an untold number of previous regenerations erased from their memory. The Master is tormented by the revelation that the Doctor turns out to be the X factor that enabled Time Lords to regenerate in the first place, while the Doctor is overwhelmed by the enormity of realizing how much of their own personal history has been lost to them.

I could talk all day about the nerdy details of this twist and my reactions to it (in fact, I have.) But today, what I want to look at specifically is the Nth Doctor and other newly-revealed earlier regenerations and what that means for representation on the show.

This is where I bring in Star Wars. The casting of the new trilogy, to many, felt like a conscious “new Star Wars for a new generation” statement. While the original and prequel trilogies both gave the impression that, at any given point, there was one Black person and one to two women in the galaxy worth talking about, the new trilogy put women and people of color front and center. Our new trio starred a white woman, a Black man, and a Latino man, and for all the ways that the trilogy could have delivered better on how it took advantage of that increased diversity, there’s no question that it looks demonstrably different than the trilogies that preceded it.

With Doctor Who, it’s much the same. After being a white man twelve times in a row (technically fourteen, if you’re counting John Hurt and the fact that the Doctor was David Tennant twice,) Jodie Whittaker was brought in as Thirteen, the first (still white) female Doctor. This move was hailed on one side as an “it’s 2018, and the Doctor’s going to be a woman!!!” victory and on another as a “capitulate to SJWs and ruin my childhood!!!” disaster, with a lot more varied opinions in between, but either way, it felt new. Similarly new-feeling were the Thirteenth Doctor’s companions, which included Ryan, the first full-time Black male companion (sorry, Mickey!), and Yaz, the first South Asian companion. The Master has gotten in on this action in recent years as well, with Michelle Gomez getting a jump on the Doctor by playing the first female Master and Sacha Dhawan as the current incarnation playing the first Master of color.

That’s an easy attitude to fall into, that diversity is “new,” modern, progressive. A sign of the changing times. But of course, diversity in all kinds of forms has always been with us. After all, as the Twelfth Doctor tells Bill in Victorian London, “History’s a whitewash” – it’s not about existing, it’s about being visible.

Which brings us around to Rogue One. Although it was released after The Force Awakens ushered in the new trilogy, it’s set just prior to A New Hope. And it stars a white woman leading an ensemble made up of men of color. By uncovering this side story that turns out to be pivotal to the outcome of A New Hope, Rogue One doesn’t frame stories about women or people of color as new. Instead, intentionally or not, it says, “These stories have always been here, you just never heard them before. You all know about the white guy who blew up the Death Star. Now it’s time to learn about the woman and people of color whose heroic sacrifice allowed him to do that.”

That’s an idea that really resonated with me after I saw Rogue One. It helped, I think, that Hidden Figures came out around the same time, a movie about real-life Black women from history whose incredible achievements had mostly gone untold, because I realized that fiction could do the same. On a meta level, new stories set in the past of the canon can highlight voices and heroes that previously didn’t have a chance to be seen when the stories being told were mostly about white men. Other genre examples of this historical course-correction include Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel, the biggest female-led superhero movies in recent memory, bothtaking place in the past. In particular, Captain Marvel, the first solo female-superhero movie for Marvel, was the MCU’s 21^st film, but the film placed Carol’s story in the ‘90s, long before Tony Stark ever introduced himself to the world as Iron Man, and it’s shown that Nick Fury takes inspiration for naming the Avengers Initiative after Carol’s plane. The latest season of Black Lightning also established the first metahuman as a Black soldier from World War II.

And of course, we have Doctor Who. While the Thirteenth Doctor may have felt to some like dragging the show into the 21^st century, the Nth Doctor shows that diversity is nothing new. This is a show that’s been around for over 50 years, and the long, uninterrupted string of white-guy regenerations was how we were introduced to the Doctor, but that’s not how the Doctor has always been. Likely before the Doctor was ever William Hartnell, she was Jo Martin, a Black woman, and she wasn’t the only one. “The Timeless Children” shows us multiple young regenerations of the Child that would grow up to become the Doctor. The very first one we meet is a Black girl, and the subject regenerations we see include, among others, an Asian girl, an Asian boy, and a Black boy.

The cynical will call it retconning, an over-devotion to “woke culture,” and others will understandably argue that moves like this can’t make up for a lack of diversity in the past (this is probably especially true with Doctor Who, given that it’s unlikely we’ll see the Nth Doctor getting much real focus as a genuine character on the show and the various incarnations of the Child were unspeaking faces in a montage that we’ll probably never see again.) However, I do see it as an apology of sorts, albeit an unspoken one. Somewhere within it is an acknowledgment that “you haven’t seen these stories before, not because they didn’t exist, but because we chose not to tell them. We chose to focus on one perspective when we could have highlighted many. Have these stories now, with our recognition that we could have been telling them all along.” And I appreciate that.