JOURNEYING BEYOND THE STARS: FINDING HOME IN THE COSMOS WITH DOCTOR WHO

Doctor Who’s 15th series is a space-time adventure. Along for the ride are the Doctor and his companion Ruby. Despite the exhilaration of their daily cosmic escapades, they keep coming back to the idea that home is still important. As the Time Lord and his young friend tumble through time and space – whether on a distant planet, an alien spaceship or somewhere far in the future and a long way from home – those moments when they slow down and stay put speak to the emotional core of their adventures. Those moments are spent in the TARDIS, their time machine, their home on the road.

THE SOUL OF THE TARDIS: MORE THAN JUST A MACHINE

The arrival at ‘Home Base Scenes: A Glimpse Inside the TARDIS’ is less a respite from the thrill of their journeys, then, than the gateway to knowing our travellers a little better. This was never more apparent than in the regeneration of the console room with things that made the TARDIS seem less like the ready-for-war machine that it had been with the Sixth Doctor in an episode called Paradise Towers (1987), and more the ship that would be home to a duo of companions. Bookshelves filled the place, and clothes racks. The hub also featured a jukebox, because why not? This wasn’t just décor, at least for my father and me, it was identity.

A STARK CONTRAST: THE CHALLENGE OF A CLINICAL HOME

The larger, more minimalist version of the current season’s console room makes an immediate challenge of intimacy. It’s hard for the set designers to draw what little personality they set out to give it (contrasted to her predecessor, the room is cluttered with the jukebox, the piano, the lift) away from the sheer size of it; whatever she does here often has to be done quickly. The minimalism of the setting makes a blunt impression as a Space, but also seems to blur the importance of the space being a home.

THE IMPORTANCE OF BONDING OFF THE BATTLEFIELD

The adventure that they find themselves in – something that in the classic era showed up every week – brings the Doctor and Ruby together, but they risk never taking that relationship beyond a superficial phase if they don’t have the base to check back into, and allow some breathing time at the end of each episode. It was never just a break in the story: it gives the audience time to absorb what has happened, but it also offers the characters time to grow.

ECHOES OF THE PAST: THE LEGACY OF DOMESTICITY IN DOCTOR WHO

Written by the returning showrunner Russell T Davies, the show has a long tradition of exploring the domestic lives of the Doctor’s companions (for example, of Rose, Martha and Donna). These explorations of the private realms of these characters makes the big planetary adventures of the Doctor that much more emotional and resonant. By contrast, Ruby’s backstory is more hinted at than developed through the few interactions she has with her surrogate family.

THE BALANCING ACT: ADVENTURES AND THE POWER OF PAUSE

This fine line is what keeps Doctor Who afloat, this push-pull between pulpy excitement and human (or Time Lord) bonding. It’s only when, among the churning sound of the TARDIS’s engine, the Doctor and his companion can sit around, each with some personal supplies and comfortable silence, that the potential for true companionship can flower. This is why those first blissful moments with Ruby, with the two of them just drifting through our cosmos doing good and looking great, are when the series is at its strongest: harnessing the biggest of cosmic vistas to the smallest of home life.

HOME: THE HEART OF EVERY ADVENTURE

In the end, Doctor Who’s sense of home is not a planet or a TARDIS, but an interpersonal space of connection and exchange, of forms of togetherness and selfhood, based on interpersonal relations over time. Despite the broader context of the cosmic and otherworldliness of the universe and species, it is the ability to return to an intimate human space, fully filled with personal objects and good company, that re-grounds both the characters and the viewers. While Doctor Who scours the experiential universe for adventure and experience, it is the return that marks the series’s inner boundary, defining time travel by being its home base, both figuratively and literally.

For this reason, home is not so much where the Doctor’s heart is, as the lodestar that keeps the Doctor and her companions from flying off the ends of the universe. The heart of the programme is that little moment inside the TARDIS, between adventures, as the Doctor leans against her console and recounts time upon time what it was like. It’s jaunts through time which we’ve come to love, but the journey home is the one that tells us why.