Media Essays: The Effect of Jubilee

Written by The Wandering Fox

Freddy and Teddy looked at the drawing Wandering Fox made of Tom Baker getting his knighthood.

Teddy: Whoa, he looks so good wearing that coat again!

Freddy: Age doesn’t stop Tom Baker from looking great in his old clothes. It’s nice we got something Doctor Who related to be happy about.

Teddy: Yeah, it’d be nice if they did something to celebrate the Eighth Doctor this year since it’ll be thirty years since he became the Doctor.

I quite agree on that guys! It’d be lovely!

Teddy: Yeah, you being a huge fan of the Eighth Doctor, I can see you yelling at them to do something for him.

Freddy: But oddly enough the Eighth Doctor has nothing to do with today’s essay, Wandering Fox?

He doesn’t. This in fact is to do with the Sixth Doctor, one of his best audios in fact is the topic today. I got this for my birthday with a few other gifts but good gosh this story was great! If you haven’t got it yet then you ought to do, it’s money well spent.

Freddy: I’m sure others will buy it. But still, what is it you want to talk of?

Well you see the thing is, it’s about Jubilee’s big effect on Doctor Who. While Ace and the Eighth Doctor had affected the modern series massively, I can’t help but feel Jubilee has had a far more bigger legacy on Doctor Who than many will give it credit it. I think they don’t want to because it would mean they’d have to confess Doctor Who is in a bad place right now. If I’m gonna write this you better hold on everybody because there’s some much needed background checking before I get to the matter.

What Is Jubilee?

This will contain spoilers for Jubilee.

Well it’s a Doctor Who story from Big Finish, released in 2003 and it starred Colin Baker and Maggie Stables as the Doctor and Evelyn. It was written by Robert Sherman. Yes, that Robert Sherman, the guy who has multiple Doctor Who credits to his name like The Chimes of Midnight and Scherzo. But of course we all know him as the man who wrote the first Dalek story for the modern series of Doctor Who. Jubilee was actually a big inspiration for that story.

Jubilee sees the Doctor and Evelyn trying to materialise the TARDIS in London but something happens and the TARDIS goes a bit tizzy until it finally manages to materialise in 2003 inside a church, where things are not what they seem: the TARDIS has become a legend with a symbol of it on the stained glass windows of the church, he and Evelyn are recognised as heroes of humanity, and the Doctor is having strange visions. Then it becomes clear: in 1903 the Daleks tried to invade the Earth but were stopped by the Doctor and Evelyn, and now there is one Dalek left. The defeat of the Daleks brought out a darker side to humanity with humans believing they were now the superior race while racism only got worser, misogyny was rampant, and humanity treated its heroes mere things to sanitise or make money out of. With history wrong and he and Evelyn now stuck in a timeline where they are beloved and played with, the Doctor has to try and right everything.

Jubilee has a lot in there that you have seen in Dalek, from the Doctor walking into a dark room where the Dalek screams his name and will exterminate him, the companion has pity for the Dalek, the companion kills the Dalek while the Doctor apologises to it, the Dalek wants orders. Jubilee though has a different setting and the climax is quite different compared to Dalek. Jubilee does a great job at showcasing how defeating a greater evil can bring out the worst in people who enjoy torture and have a macabre way of treating others. But if there’s something that has to be noted it’s how the story had in a way predicted the state Doctor Who is in now.

Reflections of the Past and Future

Interestingly, Jubilee is just as much about the Doctor as it is about the Dalek. In this alternate timeline the Doctor and Evelyn are seen as heroes, but there’s a good bit of meta work in how the Doctor is remembered. He’s almost killed for wearing his multicoloured coat which is a big secret that only the President of the Empire, his wife and minions know about, because they find it embarrassing that their hero would wear something like that. It’s a meta example of how back in the Wilderness Years the Sixth Doctor was regarded as the worst Doctor from his egotistical behaviour to his multicoloured costume. How the needle has shifted. But he’s instead remembered as a muscled man whose statue has been erected in Trafalgar Square and replaced Nelson. There’s an even darker truth to this but I won’t spoil it. It’s like how back then people would brush over the Sixth Doctor and would go to McCoy and McGann to talk of. But here’s where I can see how it’s now almost had a bit of a impact on the series since at least Tennant and Moffat.

The audio begins with a satirical take on how the Daleks and the Doctor are perceived in this timeline, the Daleks are Saturday Morning Cartoon baddies who brag about how they will conquer and exterminate all life. But then the “Doctor” appears with his companion “Evelyn” and the Daleks are scared away. But the “Doctor” and “Evelyn” aren’t who they are. It’s a TV show within Doctor Who with the Doctor and Evelyn far detached from who they are, with the Doctor seen as a younger, charming person who’s full of flirtations while his companion far younger than the real Evelyn and has a sultry side to her in wanting the Doctor to “defeat” her.

While you can look at this and see that it’s a mockery of how people made fun of Doctor Who in the nineties, look back at that and you’ll see what I mean in how it affects Doctor Who today.

You see, ever since we had Tennant as the Doctor, the character has been portrayed as a more darker menace to his enemies and is a tragic romantic hero who the companion has fallen for and the Doctor wrestles with his own immortality and his feelings for his companion. Not saying that’s Tennant’s fault as his Doctor did have more aspects to his character, but Moffat took this up to eleven (no pun intended) once he came along with the Doctor being such a legend he can scare away certain baddies by just coming in and telling them to leave. You’ve had multiple women lusting after him, some of whom are dressed up in rather tight looking costumes, even continuing this with Capaldi when it should’ve stopped by then. That is only one thing but we’ll come back to the Doctor soon as I want to talk about the Daleks. In my opinion the Daleks haven’t had a good story since Journey’s End, though Into the Dalek was not bad, but around Moffat’s era the Daleks started to become more like canon fodder or Saturday Morning Cartoon villains, taking a bigger backseat in The Magician’s Apprentice, The Witch’s Familiar and The Pilot, while Davros himself is treated as a pantomime villain who lost a good bit of character work in The Witch’s Familiar with the Doctor driving around in his life support machine. There’s a big matter in the Daleks being seen as a joke in Jubilee as I mentioned earlier with how the Daleks get scared of the “Doctor”, then there’s how we have an advert in which they go “Let’s see how the Daleks will get blown up this time!” Think of how the last few times we saw the Daleks they are almost treated as jokes like Dan walking around the Dalek shooting at him, or how the Daleks do just end up getting blown up with no deeper writing for them. That’s all they ended up being. We contrast that once more Daleks come into the story with them showing they are monsters who will kill anybody, even their parodic counterparts.

I want to come back to the Doctor. You see how I brought up in Jubilee he is treated as a muscly action guy who has women lusting after him, that basically occurred in the franchise around Tennant and Smith. But the whole matter is that they greatly altered the Doctor in Jubilee’s alternate history that he was not the same guy, the Doctor was rather unnerved by how he was revered by everybody and he ended up clashing with those who see him as their hero. Let’s look at what the Doctor is now. He’s no longer a Time Lord, he’s had more lives than we thought of, is now far more human than he used to be and has lost that element of being an alien that the others had. He’s instead now just a over the top millennial who says things you just can’t think the others would say, he ignores the human crimes being committed in a place simply because it’s his safe space, he’s more muscly and doesn’t have a costume you can say is the Doctor, or how he cries in almost every episode. His regeneration has been played out as a spectacle or PR stunt, which I still say started with Moffat given he started letting the Doctor use regeneration to heal bruises. But now his regeneration has just been done as a big game with Billie Piper thrown in. The character we got now isn’t the Doctor anymore. Even the TARDIS isn’t this iconic piece that should be treated with respect, it’s now a millionaire playground for RTD to have birthday bashes in. It’s funny cos Robert Sherman commented on Doctor Who’s current way and everybody took one comment of his and spun it as something else.

What Robert said was that he thinks with the way how the last episode ended he doesn’t know how Doctor Who can go forward cos in the past we had the Seventh or Eighth Doctors to tell stories with, but Billie Piper is a big unknown, you don’t know her character, you can’t continue Doctor Who without something there to help you tell more stories. But no, certain guys had to twist what he meant.

In a way Jubilee did end up showing that yes, Doctor Who with the wrong people just ends up badly hurting it. With Doctor Who under RTD who’s lost his old spark and is motivated more by political beliefs and chasing trends or social subjects, he’s turned Doctor Who into something that belongs more in the Jubilee universe than in the actual Doctor Who.

Doctor Who’s future is unknown beyond this year’s Christmas special, with the spin off’s viewing figures in the toilet that even it’s +7 numbers looking terrible, the question has to be asked again: is it time for Doctor Who to call it a day and give it another few years to try and learn from its mistakes? I believe it should. But will they let it go? No. But of it does I recommend anybody who wants to bring Doctor Who back to listen to Jubilee. That will give you a good example of what to not do with the franchise.

Freddy: That’s quite a good way of looking at it.

Teddy: That it does. I only hope others reading this will give Jubilee a watch.

I would like that. What do you guys think? Do tell below.

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