HIV-AIDS metaphor in series 1-4 of Doctor Who (2005)
Fair warning that you have to accept that there is at least homoerotic tension between the Doctor and the Master to understand this post.
The Time War was first and foremost a narrative device used by RTD to answer a plot hole he had created himself in his pitch to the BBC to revive Doctor Who. Indeed, he suggested “no baggage” which meant no Time Lords & no Gallifrey. (T is for Television by Mark Aldridge and Andy Murray)
That doesn’t mean we can’t question what it symbolises in the show and in its time.
(Two important caveats:
The AIDS epidemic is still very much happening.
Any depiction of the AIDS crisis / any metaphor will be fragmented and very much subjective because a writer and a reader / viewer watches from a specific point of view)
I’ve considered a few key episodes but truthfully you can consider all of series 1 to 4 as part of this idea. Of course, the series 3 finale trilogy has a key place in this.
The End of the World
Dalek
Father’s Day
New Earth
School Reunion
Gridlock
Utopia
The Sound of Drums
Last of the Time Lords
End of Time part 1
The Doctor finds himself the only surviving member of his planet. “I lived. Everyone else died. - What do you mean? – Everyone died Sarah.” (School Reunion, Doctor Who, Series 2) And he’s left fending for himself in the world. Then there’s guilt, RTD didn’t bother to make it subtle. Survivor’s guilt and are recurring theme of first 3 series of Doctor Who. It starts to make sense with Dalek and it’s an ongoing theme from then on.
Many queer people found themselves the only surviving person of their group of friends. If they were HIV-positive a lot of them wondered how they managed to survive it, if they were HIV-negative they sometimes wondered how they didn’t get it. Trauma in long term survivor of AIDS has been studied both through psychological and sociological lenses, enormous loss and guilt always come up. And it’s something that you can find in memoirs and autobiographies.
Outside of the Utopia - The Sound of the Drums - Last of the Time Lords there is one scene I want to discuss in depth:
Gridlock is an interesting episode. The conversation between the Face of Boe and the Doctor mirrors the one he will have with the Master later in the series (and we will talk about it). But more than that the conversation between Martha and the Doctor at the very end of the episode is fascinating.
“I lied to you, because I liked it. I could pretend. Just for a bit, I could imagine they were still alive, underneath a burnt orange sky. I'm not just a Time Lord. I'm the last of the Time Lords. The Face of Boe was wrong. There's no one else. – What happened? – There was a war. A Time War. The last Great Time War. My people fought a race called the Daleks, for the sake of all creation. And they lost. They lost. Everyone lost. They're all gone now. My family, my friends, even that sky. Oh, you should have seen it, that old planet. The second sun would rise in the south, and the mountains would shine. The leaves on the trees were silver, and when they caught the light every morning, it looked like a forest on fire. When the autumn came, the breeze would blow through the branches like a song.” (Gridlock, Doctor Who, Series 3)
The Doctor and Martha’s relationship has been analysed in many ways and I won’t try to argue with them here. However, I think at that very moment we can see the Doctor as an old(er) gay man talking about the loss not only of his friends but of the places he had come to call home.
All this in an episode where we’ve seen a city devastated by an epidemic.
Now about the finale three episodes of series 3:
I won’t go too much into the Doctor/Master relationship because the relationship between Ten and Simm has been analysed thoroughly before. However, in Utopia the Doctor tells him two things, that they are both alone and he is sorry.
One of the last scenes of Last of the Time Lords features the Master dying in the Doctor’s arms while the Doctor begs for him to stay alive “You've got to. Come on. It can't end like this. You and me, all the things we've done. (…) We're the only two left. There's no one else. Regenerate!” (Last of the Time Lords, Doctor Who, Series 3).
Someone is begging his friend to stay alive. He is asking him to use a treatment available to him, a treatment that has been shown to be painful and traumatic but it’s the only way to stay alive. It’s also the only way his friend won’t be alone again. Real life translation – HIV first effective treatments did work but people were sometimes burnt out.
I have wanted to make a post for a little while but hearing RTD talk about Queer as Folk and It’s a sin made me want to write about this.
I hope you found something interesting here.
(finally wrote this @roxannepolice )