War without end? utopia, the family, and the post-9/11 world in Russell T. Davies's Doctor Who

This essay explores the ideological positioning of Russel T. Davies’s reinvention of the classic British TV series Doctor Who. Davies’s program has announced in its themes, settings, and allusions an unusually direct engagement with contemporary politics: specifically, the repercussions of the Al-Qaeda strikes of September 11, 2001. Like American television’s Heroes and Battlestar Galactica, the new Doctor Who argues against the totalizing strategies advanced by both sides in the war on terror, denouncing violent modes of pseudo-utopian fundamentalism in favor of pluralist and personal solutions to global problems. Yet it has also remained aware of its own protagonists’ potential to succumb to such forms of fantaticism. Exploring in detail the reimagined Doctor Who’s first four seasons (2005-2008), the essay shows how the series investigates, juxtaposes, and perhaps eventually reconciles two concepts central to its narrative: utopia and family.