In a key scene in the 2007 Doctor Who episode “The Family of Blood,” set on the eve of the Great War, Headmaster Rocastle marshals the students of Faringham School for Boys, with the intention of warding off the Family of Blood and their army of scarecrows. While the headmaster vicariously relives his service in the Boer War, the students themselves sob as they fire rifles and man Gatling guns. Only schoolteacher John Smith holds his fire, as he eyes the crying boys. What causes his restraint? On the surface, “John Smith” is a human abiding by the traditions of valor espoused in nineteenth-century realist fiction and pastoral poetry, but submerged under this persona is the time-traveling Doctor, whose adventures through time and space have shattered those nineteenth-century notions about warfare and honor reified in realism and the pastoral.
In this paper, I contend that non-realist genres, such as science fiction, countermand preconceived values and force viewers to reassess their attachment to prevailing ideological myths—a project that is especially pressing today, as America and the European Union member states have reverted to patriotic, nationalistic, and exclusionary public discourses. To this end, I analyze how the two-part Doctor Who storyline (“Human Nature” and “The Family of Blood”) revives the generic break that occurred as a consequence of the experimental poetry and prose of the Great War. That is, this paper’s central contention is that genre and form are inextricable from a goal shared by the Doctor Who showrunners and British Great War writers, like Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Rebecca West, and others: to dispel the domestic and military fantasies of nineteenth-century realism and the pastoral.
About the presenterPatrick Thomas Henry
Patrick Thomas Henry is the Associate Editor for Fiction and Poetry at Modern Language Studies. His fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming from Fiction Southeast, Souvenir Lit, Passages North, Clarion, and others. His essays have appeared in or are forthcoming from European Romantic Review, Response, Massachusetts Review, North Dakota Quarterly, and others. He teaches creative writing at the University of North Dakota. You can find him online at patrickthomashenry.com or on Twitter @Patrick_T_Henry.