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Catherine Nickerson

SOURCE: "Serial Detection and Serial Killers in Twin Peaks," in Literature Film Quarterly, Vol. 21, No. 4, 1993, pp. 271-76.

[In the following essay, Nickerson discusses ways in which Twin Peaks both embodies and subverts the conventions of detective fiction while employing characteristics of the literary gothic tradition.]

During its first season, Twin Peaks invited us to watch as if we were reading a detective novel. The narrative began with—or at—a dead body, as all proper detective stories do, then unfolded into a series of investigative responses to the murder of a young woman: the arrival of a heroic detective, the evaluation of physical and forensic evidence, the interrogation of suspects and witnesses. But as many people have observed, the series seemed, in the second season—if not even earlier—to become something quite other than a televised detective novel. Twin Peaks asks us to compare it with the literary detective novel in both its parody of the genre and its celebration of detective conventions, but, at the same time, the series slyly disassembles the narrative structure that undergirds detective fiction. This subversion is precisely what makes the show so simultaneously like and unlike a detective novel.

The parody and celebration begin with the arrival of the FBI agent, Dale Cooper. Cooper is a "Special Agent" in many senses; all the qualities that immediately mark him as special or extraordinary—his perceptions of what is unusual about Twin Peaks; his attention to correct FBI procedures and protocol; his ability and willingness to look with cool suspicion past social standing and social performances—are those of the hero-detective of both the British classic style and the American hard-boiled school. Cooper quickly establishes his investigative authority—not only directly (telling Truman, "the Bureau gets called in, Bureau's in charge; you're going to be working for me"), but also by deed, proving his genius when he points out that the picnic videotape captures the reflection of James Hurley's motorcycle in the iris of Laura Palmer's eye ("holy smoke," we chorus with Truman and Lucy). Cooper's virtuosity suggests that the game being laid out is an evidentiary one, one in which we can participate by close attention and reasoned speculation based on the facts gathered by the sheriff's deputies and by Albert Rosenfeld's examination of the body. Even when the investigative methodologies get weird—interpretation of dreams and mind-body coordination—the guiding principle Cooper declares allegiance to is "break the code, solve the crime" (episode four). This cryptological tenet is one that has been fundamental to detective fiction since Poe, whose tales of ratiocination celebrate the "mind that disentangles" and whose "The Gold-Bug" makes explicit an analogy between the search for the truth and the deciphering of codes.¹

Like all heroic detectives, Cooper is an indefatigable truth seeker. In an impulse shared by the Op of Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest who continues investigating the goings-on in Poisonville even after his client fires him, Cooper keeps working (as a sheriff's deputy) toward the truth after he is relieved of his duties by the Bureau. Detectives, as detective fiction has created them, are not innocent men and women: they are cynical, they understand the methods and thought processes of criminals, and some—especially in the hard-boiled school—cross the line into extralegal behavior in more or less serious ways (as when Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone picks the locks of suspects' apartments or Cooper crosses the border into Canada). But, while the detective-hero is not innocent or without moral weakness, he or she is, in the ways that really matter, an incorruptible agent of truth and justice. Cooper establishes his particular brand of morality early in the first season when he cuts off Albert's necrophagous zeal and allows the Palmer family to bury Laura's body, and when he refuses to help Albert file a complaint against Sheriff Truman, citing the "decency, honor and dignity" of the "good people" of Twin Peaks, where "life has meaning . . . every life" (episode four).

Especially important is the question of Cooper's sexual morality. We know that Cooper is attracted to Audrey, but he refuses to take advantage of her youthful infatuation. Even when Audrey plants herself in his bed, Cooper sticks to the straight and narrow: "Audrey, you're a high-school girl. I'm an agent of the FBI. . . . When a man joins the FBI, he swears to uphold certain values" (episode seven). The crucial moment in this scene—which works so hard to establish Cooper as a superior moral being—comes at the end, when Cooper tells Audrey that "secrets are dangerous things." He verbalizes something we understand as a given of detective fiction: the difference between the epistemological role of the object of a criminal investigation ("Laura had a lot of secrets," notes Audrey) and that of the detective ("my job is to find those out," responds Cooper). For all his quirks, Cooper is in this first season a simple character: he has, as he assures Audrey in the scene above, no past and no secrets. He investigates the secrets of others, but he is, like classic British and hard-boiled American detectives, not himself a person to be investigated.

However, the second season offers a fundamental readjustment of that depiction of Cooper; the shift of focus from Laura Palmer's past to Dale Cooper's past signals a number of other changes in both the epistemological and the narrative structures of Twin Peaks. The shift can be quite precisely located, in another conversation between Cooper and Audrey in episode eighteen, a scene that is—significantly—a revision of the one in which Cooper discovers Audrey in his bed. As Cooper prepares to leave Twin Peaks, Audrey comes to his hotel room to say goodbye; the first indication that something is about to change is Cooper's statement that he is "going fishing," an exact repetition of the declaration with which Pete Martell opens the show's verbal narrative. This scene is part of the episode in which Twin Peaks seems to start all over again; having more or less solved the murder of Laura Palmer, the show must find a new object of investigation. At least one of those objects—as FBI Agent Roger Hardy announces later in this episode—will be Cooper himself.

The bedroom conversation that ensues when Audrey comes to say goodbye is one that rewrites their earlier exchange concerning Cooper's past. Previously, Cooper insisted that he had no secrets; here he tells us that he does, in fact, have a skeleton in the closet. When Cooper reminds Audrey that he has a "personal policy" against romantic entanglements with women who have been involved in his cases, Audrey says, "someone must have hurt you once really badly." Cooper drops a narrative bombshell when he answers:

COOPER: No, someone was hurt by me. And I'll never let that happen again.

AUDREY: What happened? Did she die or something?

COOPER: As a matter of fact, she did. Wanna know how? . . . We were supposed to protect her. . . . And when the attempt on her life was finally made, I wasn't ready because I loved her. She died in my arms. I was badly injured and my partner lost his mind. Need to hear anymore?

Of course, we do need to hear more, because Cooper is leaving out some crucial facts about this tragic love affair. But for the moment, we think we have heard enough—that Cooper was in love with a woman involved in a case, that he was supposed to protect her and failed to do so—largely because we have heard it all before. Specifically, we heard this conversation in a bedroom in Roman Polanski's Chinatown, when Evelyn Mulwray questions Jake Gittes about the experiences in Chinatown that he prefers not to speak of:

JAKE: I was trying to keep someone from being hurt. I ended up making sure that she was hurt.

EVELYN: Cherchez la femme. Was there a woman involved?

JAKE: Of course.

EVELYN: Dead?

The reference to Chinatown resonates from this point forward to the end of the series, for in Twin Peaks as in Chinatown the past is determined to repeat itself. This scene warns us that any woman Cooper becomes involved with is at serious risk, though the specific shape of Windom Earle's revenge is still unforeseeable. The shift is one of narrative structure and, paradoxically, the more we learn about Cooper's past, the stronger the forward pull of the story becomes. What has happened in restarting Twin Peaks after the solution of Laura Palmer's murder is an important disruption of the paradigmatic narrative structure of the detective novel.

The basic narrative structure of the detective novel is a double, and doubled, one.² One strand of the narrative is the story of the investigation: the discovery of the body, the search for and interpretation of physical evidence, the interrogation of witnesses and surveillance of suspects, and the apprehension of the murderer. The second strand is the story of the actual murder: how and why it was committed, who was involved, and how the murderer concealed his or her identity. This second story is a submerged and secret one—one that has been deliberately rendered unreadable by a murderer who figuratively and literally attempts to cover his or her tracks. The story of investigation, then, is also a story of construction or reconstruction of fragments into narrative coherency. Detective fiction has two sets of contradictory impulses, both of which reveal their connections to the more general gothic mode from which they evolved. Detective fiction contains—in the murderer's story—a narrative of concealment and—in the detective's investigation—a narrative of disclosure. Oscillation between the urge to repress knowledge into secrecy and the compulsion to reveal what is concealed is one of the central features of Gothic narrative;³ in detective fiction that oscillation is largely—but not entirely—stabilized by the privileging of investigation and resolution. Detective fiction also contains opposing trajectories of narrative time. While the criminal investigation moves forward in time toward the goal of identification and apprehension, the reconstruction of the story of murder is a movement backward in narrative time.

In the detective novel, the solution of the crime is also a recuperation—a retrieval and a resolution—of the past. In the first season, that retrieval is the underlying goal of both Cooper and the Sheriff's department and of the amateur team of James, Donna, and Maddy; we see it in the attention paid to alibis, to ways that physical evidence links certain people to the crime scene, and to the stories people tell about their relationships to the murder victim. Much is done to gather and interpret the fragmented traces that Laura Palmer has left behind—the secret and incomplete diaries, the audio- and videotapes, the broken heart, the cash and cocaine, the chocolate bunnies—that might constitute a coherent narrative of her life, if not her murder. However, Twin Peaks evades and subverts that structure in several ways. The more visible emblems of the way that the show resists the paradigm of retrieval-asrecuperation include Major Briggs's mysterious journey backwards and/or forward in time and the fact that the killer BOB exists outside the space-time continuum. The sense of time is so fragmented and chaotic that it is entirely possible to believe that the killer BOB and the spirit Mike are actually the future manifestations of Bobby Briggs and his sidekick Mike Nelson (who claim to have killed someone in the period before the show begins).⁴

More important, however, is the renovation of the narrative structure of Twin Peaks—a show which seems at first to be in the tradition of the magazine detective serial—that is announced in the second bedroom conversation between Audrey and Cooper cited above. From this point on, Twin Peaks becomes increasingly removed from the double structure of a detective novel and closer to a purely forward-moving serial narrative. The key, paradoxically, is the introduction of material about Cooper's past. The difference between this exposure of the past and the kind of retrieval of the past that completes the detective novel is that the story of Cooper's past tells a story of revenge against him in the future. Like Jake Gittes's, Cooper's tale is a disclosure of certain facts—a woman in danger, a detective in love—but is emphatically not a gesture of closure. Cooper's past is only introduced as the context in which to understand the last nine episodes of the show.

Earlier I stated that one of the objects of investigation in the renovated or restarted narrative of those last nine episodes is Cooper himself. One of the others is Windom Earle, and his arrival in Twin Peaks initiates a further disruption and dismantling of the detective-fiction narrative structure that seemed to be operative—if not predominant—in the first season. Windom Earle is so disruptive because he—even more than BOB—is a radically serial killer. His murders don't remain in a retrievable or recuperative past because they are only understandable as parts of a chain of events that stretch into the future as well as into the past. We might state it even more strongly, describing Earle as a narrative killer, whose crimes are so closely woven together that they constitute a sustained act of story telling. To be sure, BOB is a repetitive killer (murdering both Laura and her double) with a sense of linguistic sequence (his "signature" action is the insertion of the letters of his name under the fingernails of his victims). But where BOB simply spells his name, Earle writes a novel, one that includes himself, Caroline, Cooper, and Annie Blackburne as the main characters. His narrative style is both more grandiose than BOB's—he writes the initial "C" of Caroline on an enormous scale by sending parts of her wedding outfit to police stations over a large area of the country—and more ludicrous. His narrative is both stylistically and thematically based on chess: he likes to make Cooper think four or five moves ahead, and he wants to literalize the game by clearing away the pawns and capturing Cooper's queen. Cooper's response—to enlist Pete Martell in finding moves that will not allow Earle to remove a piece from the chessboard—is one that enmeshes him in Earle's criminal narrative to the detriment of his ability to investigate it. Cooper slips from the role of the gifted reader of criminal narratives into the less powerful role of a character in one; if the detective seems sometimes to be author of a narrative about the fragmentary made coherent, Cooper has lost that status by capitulating to Earle's rivaling authorship.

Earle's narrative is one that connects the past to the future (by, for example, stabbing a drifter exactly the way that he stabbed Caroline) in ways that are diseased, but not disorganized. There is, one might argue, too much coherence and unity to Earle's story. Once Cooper relinquishes his status as an outsider to the criminal narratives operating in Twin Peaks (beginning at or before the moment he becomes a sheriff's deputy instead of a Federal agent), he—and the entire show—are pulled seaward by the narrative undertow of Earle's revenge plot. That current is one that pulls the events of the past through the present, sweeping both past and present into the future. The world of the last nine episodes of the show is such that one expects to find one's past before one; in the sense that Earle's plot is a vengeful return of the repressed, Twin Peaks is a gothic place.

In fact, Twin Peaks is laced with gothic figurations and gestures, revealing a preoccupation with gothicism that goes beyond its engagement with detective fiction. We see the mark of the gothic in the opening shot of Josie painting her lips in the mirror; Lynch tropes the Orientalism so prevalent in the traditional gothic mode to make her face the emblem not only of mystery but of knowingness. The show is filled with gothic touches: secret passageways, mirrors, disguises and masks, eavesdropping, secret paternity, invalidism, and the threat of incest. One of the most striking features of the gothic mode is that secrets are always revealed, no matter how vehemently they are repressed, and this is certainly true of Twin Peaks. There is a compulsion to confess—always paired with a desire to conceal—that runs through the gothic, and we see it operating when Catherine keeps double books on the mill and when Laura Palmer keeps double books on her life. There are other emblems of the inevitability of disclosure, including Waldo, the talking bird who saw and heard it all, and the Log Lady's log, who has "something to say" about the night of Laura Palmer's death, and the letters BOB leaves under his victims' fingernails.⁵

The most significant gothic convention at work—and in play—in Twin Peaks is that of the double. Not only do we have the complex and puzzling resemblance of Laura Palmer and Maddy Ferguson, the grotesque doubles of the dwarf and the giant, and the double consciousness of Philip Gerard and Mike, but also we have a principle of doubling at work in the plot of the show, especially in the last nine episodes. Windom Earle is, of course, Dale Cooper's double—his alienated partner and teacher, his sexual rival, and his moral and criminal opposite. A confrontation between them becomes inevitable; the narrative undertow pulls us toward the future in general and toward the victory of one of these agents over the other. The discovery of the existence of a white lodge and a black lodge only reinforces the sense that the narrative is shifting into uncanny oppositions and repetitions, patterns that seem to point to disastrous, but definitive, endings. The ending of Twin Peaks is this kind of disaster, as it is the merger of Cooper with his shadow self. He is, in the black lodge, overtaken by an alternate version of himself, who may be BOB or simply the intermediary that allows BOB to invade the host. In any case, that merger of the morally superior Cooper with the depraved and chaotic BOB is a gesture of firm, if disturbing closure.

The ending of Twin Peaks is strictly antithetical to the plot structure of classic British and even hard-boiled detective fiction. It is a commonplace to say that the detective novel begins with a sense of innocence violated by the discovery of a murder and works to restore that sense of innocence and order by rooting out and abolishing the murderer.⁶Twin Peaks, of course, begins with a sense of innocence violated, but ends with the complete destruction of the detective-hero who was supposed to restore the goodness and stability of the social order. In hard-boiled detective fiction, investigation may temporarily make things worse—not better—as it puts pressure on a desperate murderer who may kill again to silence a potential witness. In Twin Peaks, the suspicion that the detective may do more harm than good is articulated as a direct accusation against Cooper by Jean Renault:

Before you came, Twin Peaks was a simple place. . . . Quiet people lived a quiet life. Then a pretty girl die, and you arrive, and everything change. . . . Suddenly the simple dream become the nightmare. So if you die, maybe you will be the last to die. Maybe you brought the nightmare with you, and maybe the nightmare will die with you. (episode twenty-one)

Cooper, listening, seems to take Jean's words to heart, and perhaps we should also. The scene ends with Cooper shooting and killing Jean Renault, and the episode ends with the discovery of a corpse bearing the signature of Windom Earle and demonstrating the nightmarish content of the "baggage" Cooper admits bringing to town (episode twenty-two).

So, while Twin Peaks contains many elements of detective fiction, it ultimately subverts the narrative structures and intentions of the genre. Like Chinatown, it leaves us with the image of the detective defeated and even vilified. The failure of the investigative narrative to master the criminal narrative or to recuperate the past suggests that Twin Peaks may be best understood not as hardboiled detective fiction, but as hard-boiled gothic. As Lynch tells us, in the guise of Cooper's supervisor Gordon Cole, "I believe in secrecy" (episode fourteen); since we know that "secrets are dangerous things," we know that Twin Peaks believes in danger even more strongly than it believes in Special Agent Cooper.

NOTES

¹ Edgar Allan Poe, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," The Complete Tales and Poems (New York: Random House, 1975) 141.

² My sense of the doubled narrative of detective fiction is based on the analysis of the narrative structure of the genre by Tstevan Todorov in The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977) 45.

³ See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (New York: Methuen, 1986) 19-20.

⁴ Truman's reaction upon hearing the names "Mike and Bob" in Cooper's account of his dream is a surprised "Mike and Bobby?" My thanks to Bruce Covey for sharing this interpretation with me.

⁵ However, in Twin Peaks, even more than in most detective novels, the narrative privileges the act of knowing over the act of telling; one of Cooper's most impressive gifts is his ability to discern, on the basis of almost no information whatsoever, who is sleeping with whom in Twin Peaks.

⁶The source of this commonplace is an essay—perhaps overly tidy, but nevertheless important—by W.H. Auden from 1948: "The Guilty Vicarage" in Detective Fiction; A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robin Winks (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1980).

Frank W. Oglesbee

SOURCE: "Doctor Who: Televised Science Fiction as Contemporary Melodrama," in Extrapolation, Vol. 30, No. 2, Summer, 1989, pp. 176-87.

[In the following essay, Oglesbee details how conventions of science fiction and literary melodrama are utilized in Dr. Who.]

Science fiction television programs have one thing in common with all other genres—more fail than succeed. And, given the comparatively high cost and low audience figures, science fiction is less common than, for example, situation comedies. In 1988, however, the longest running prime-time drama series in the world is Doctor Who, in production since 1963. It has become an international success, whose audience includes as many adults as children. In 1983, ten thousand people attended a twentieth-birthday party for the series in Chicago; forty thousand attended a similar event in England (Tulloch and Alvarado, 5, 11).

The program, successful in itself, has given rise to ancillary elements familiar in popular culture; paperback novelizations, tee shirts, and other memorabilia—one catalog lists over eight hundred items (Star Tech). Numerous fan clubs have been organized, the largest being the Doctor Who Appreciation Society (Great Britain) and the Doctor Who Fan Club of America. Three magazines, Doctor Who Monthly, Fantasy Empire, and The Doctor Who Magazine, center on the series.

Lofficier (1981) has written two guide books to the series: the first summarizing stories; the second indexing characters and places mentioned in the series. Haining (1983, 1984) has also written two books: the first, an overview with interviews and essays by actors, writers, and producers; the second, a summary of events in the series' history through the first half of 1984, which draws on English and Australian newspapers, parliamentary records, fan magazines, etc. The longest scholarly study to date, by Tulloch and Alvarado (1984), examines the program in terms of the "industrial, institutional, . . . and other practices which have shaped it" (2).

None of the writers mentioned here noted Doctor Who's relation to melodrama, in the better sense of the word, This science fiction series is a modern romantic melodrama, carrying out a classical comedy function, within a tight aesthetic and budgetary framework. It resembles soap opera in structure, with science fiction plots and special effects, but has unique features.

Further, Doctor Who's accessibility makes over twenty years of a popular culture text available for study: many PBS stations play it, and the BBC is releasing videotapes for sale to the public.

The remainder of the essay summarizes concepts of science fiction and melodrama, briefly describes the nature of the series, and shows, through two detailed examples, how the program applies the theories of science fiction and melodrama in a practical manner.

SCIENCE FICTION

Butor says the best science fiction treats "the interface between man and machine" (177). It is a form which speculates on "the human experience of science and its resultant technologies" (Bretnor 150). It provides a "sense of novelty" and has "a dislocation in time or space" (Warwick 82). Constant factors include either "a world in some respect different from our own," or "the impact of some strange element on our world" (Rose 3). Its themes include: time travel, alien encounters, questing scientists, dystopian satires, post-apocalyptic scenes, or evolutionary fables (Rose 2). Science fiction film, and by extension television—together the "art of the moving image, the only art that is truly of our time," (Bettleheim 80)—can show a "visual play of man's fears and symbols in the twentieth century" (Zebrowski 48).

The limits of science fiction on television are not limits of science fiction alone, but those of televised drama. The question is not whether drama is unreal; it must be, The question is whether the unreality is acceptably done, In television, it is often acceptably done as melodrama, a term often used pejoratively, but recent criticism takes exception to this.

MELODRAMA

Kehr says the term melodrama "conjures visions of mustache-twirling villains and virginal heroines strapped to sawmills, and the term is usually reserved for the crudest work in the field (that is, we seem capable of recognizing melodrama only when it fails)" (43-44). But, he holds, when "understood as a genre rather than as a negative judgment on style, it is clearly no worse (and no better) than any other ritual form" (44).

Conversely, when melodrama succeeds—when we accept a melodramatic unreality—we do not recognize it as "melodrama," that quaint form from the last century. In the 1980s, the virgin, the sawmill, the deed to the farm seem a ludicrous set of concerns. But rape, actual or metaphorical, by an evil persona is still a valid premise. Threats to life, property, honor are symbolized differently across time but still exist. In science fiction, a villain may threaten to hurl the heroine into the vacuum of space unless he gets the device needed for his plan of galactic conquest: the virgin, the deed, and the sawmill reinvented.

Audiences accept and enjoy certain conventions as long as they do not interfere with the central thrust of science fiction, "more concerned with the conduct of human society than with its techniques" (Merrill 59)—as is melodrama.

Gowans holds that "television is the last and finest representative of traditional melodrama" (174) Thorburn writes in more detail that television is often contemporary melodrama: ritualistic, cunning, adaptable, optimistic (529-546). Melodrama has important functions with which science fiction can be congruent. It enacts a "fantasy of reassurance" (531). It says that ordinary people matter; that their problems and concerns are worthy of attention; that goodness and decency are preferable to evil and cruelty (Thorburn 531-532, Kehr 43-44). Rahill classifies it as "conventionally moral and humanitarian in point of view, and sentimental and optimistic in temper, concluding its fable happily with virtue rewarded after many trials and vice punished" (xiv).

Lastly, melodrama and science fiction are often Romantic, as Romance has at its core "a Manichean vision of the universe as a struggle between good and bad magic" (Nicholls 180-181). Many interested in science fiction will recall Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" (Briggs 35).

A science fiction series might, if it ran long enough, show examples of dystopias, time and space travel, worlds impacted, aliens, blessings and curses of technology, apocalypse and the aftermath, and questing scientists. If melodramatic, it would do this with Manichean tones, yet offer a fantasy of reassurance, arguing the human race will survive. All of this to be done within the aesthetic and budget limits of television, "the rectangle and the dollar," as choreographer Twyla Tharp puts it.

No other science fiction series has so determinedly carried out the melodramatic themes within such a tight budget as Doctor Who, The Buck Rogers and Battlestar Galactica series of the late 1970s cost as much as a million dollars an episode, while Doctor Who cost about $150,000—less than a typical situation comedy made for commercial television in the USA.

Doctor Who also includes elements which no other science fiction series does. An exposition on the series will precede examples concentrating on two principal recurring villains, the dehumanized Daleks and the humanoid master.

THE SERIES

The series centers on the picaresque adventures of "the Doctor," a time-and-space traveling, questing, humanitarian, scientific individualist. Mister Spock, a major character in Star Trek, was half-human; the Doctor is fully alien, a two-hearted native of the planet Gallifrey, a somewhat dystopic, stagnant and conservative society. The Doctor's temperament was unsuited to this, so he left, "borrowing" a Tardis, a vehicle named for its ability to move in "Time and Relative Dimensions in Space." Not all Gallifreyans have access to a Tardis; the planet is ruled by Time Lords, those Gallifreyans who, after arduous study at the Academy, qualify.

The above exemplifies the cunning adaptability of melodrama. Originally, the Doctor was an outcast for unknown reasons from an unnamed planet. As the series continued, a history was invented. Time Lords were not mentioned until the sixth season ("War Games" 1969); their planet, first seen in "The Three Doctors" (1973), was not named until the next year, in "The Time Warrior."

One of the program's unique elements also arose from necessity. William Hartneil, who originated the role of the Doctor, was stricken with multiple sclerosis and had to retire. While it is not unknown for a new actor to take over a part, what makes the series unique is that the change was explained as "regeneration." Time Lords regenerate into new bodies twelve times before they die; this may be normal or brought on by severe trauma, which is the case with the Doctor, because of his risky lifestyle. The practical result of the premise is that every few years a new actor plays the role, bringing a new perspective, and considerable publicity, to the series.

To assist in continuity, and to provide further new faces and characters, the series features Companions, major supporting roles who join the Doctor for one or two seasons; the longer terms are for those who carry over after a regeneration. Companions carry out the traditional functions of the hero's or heroes' side-kicks. Their dialogue aids in exposition; they rescue, or are rescued by, the Doctor; they provide a contrast in persona. Don Quixote needs Sancho Panza, and the Lone Ranger needs Tonto; the audience needs them too—it would be quite tiresome if the Don and the Lone Ranger explained everything to their horses. As the Doctor has always been played by a male, the majority of Companions have been female. Beginning with the third Doctor, these roles have reflected social changes, with increasing feminism. This is not unique to the series, but helps to explain its appeal. Apart from the Companions, females are often scientists, military officers, starship captains, or planetary rulers.

A second characteristic unique to the series is a continuous sense of humor, rather than the intermittent examples seen in Star Trek or the Twilight Zone. Faced with a villain announcing a plan to rule the world (or universe), the Doctor's reaction is likely to be, "Oh—that again," or "But that would take up all your time." Asked by a Companion if they should interfere in some dispute he says, "Of course we should interfere. Always do what you're best at." He tells another that if you show people you're unarmed and mean them no harm, they won't harm you. "It always works—nine times out of ten. Well, seven times out of ten."

The third unusual difference in Doctor Who is that its stories are told in episodic serial form. Unlike the commonest series arrangement (self-contained storylines in every episode) or soap opera (one or more storylines running until exhausting audience interest or writers' invention), an episodic serial tells a story in a pre-determined number of episodes. Unlike a miniseries, the serial continues and tells another story. The typical Doctor Who adventure, as the stories are called, takes four or six twenty-five minute episodes, allowing more complex plots, and more importantly, more time for character interaction, than a half-hour or hour episode.

Character interaction is a major strength of the series. As one of its producers explains, Doctor Who, lacking the budget to compete with the technological slickness of a Star Trek, relies on a British "television strength . . . building and creating character . . . and pretty quirky character at that" (Tulloch and Alvarado 159).

Doctor Who, then, deliberately uses the limit of televised drama to present ideas through characters. Such science fiction drama "frequently treats the ethical behavior of scientists as its major theme. . . . We expect the story to contain either explicit or implicit statements of ethical postulates, and we expect to see the coherent working out of a morally right course of action" (Butrym 55).

The Doctor, the central character of the series, is a scientist who argues and strives for the morally right choice. In the rare instance when he makes the wrong choice, and then by accident, he corrects it. In "Face of Evil" (1977), the Doctor finds that in trying, centuries ago, to repair the main computer of a wrecked spaceship, he started the evolution of a new form of life, a machine-creature. Unfortunately, it became a paranoid schizophrenic, which set itself up as the god Xoanon, putting the tribes descended from the ship's personnel at war. Not for the first time in the series, a failed technology becomes religion, in a story which warns against giving godlike properties to machinery. The Doctor, in a brief session of reality therapy, shows it the mistake. It repairs itself, and offers atonement through service to the uniting tribes. To give a melodramatic flourish appropriate to the series, in the final scenes the leaders of the tribes argue loudly (but nonviolently) over rights and duties. "Ah, gentlemen, democracy at work, I see," says the Doctor, and takes his leave.

The attitude toward technology is firmly on the middle ground; technology may be used for good or ill. This contrasts with two points of view from earlier periods of science fiction. American science fiction in particular, from 1879-1930, was largely optimistic about the benefits of technology. Stories were often imperialistic in thrust; and racist, or at least chauvinistic, in tone; with American scientists overcoming foreign/alien perils, as in Serviss's Edison's Conquest of Mars, written in reaction to Wells's War of the Worlds. (For a detailed exposition of this view, see Clareson.)

The Second World War and the start of the nuclear age increased the incidence of another science fiction theme—the mad or amoral scientist. In films—which as drama require characters to personalize abstractions—such scientists and their allies, the technocrats, became prominent from the late 1940s through about 1965. (For critical reviews of several films on the nuclear threat, see Shaheen.)

The Doctor, then, represents Good, and frequently opposes Evil scientists and their work—exemplified by the Daleks and the Master.

THE DALEKS

The Daleks, bent on ruling the universe, are responsible for the series' early success. Dr. Who drew a small audience in its first weeks and was an unlikely candidate for renewal (Road 28-29). The Daleks quadrupled the audience. They were also the first merchandising venture for the series, their image appearing on punching bags, wall-paper, lapel pins, as wind-up toys, and so forth (Bentham 38-44).

Daleks were invented by Terry Nation, script editor of the series, who wanted to do a monster "that wasn't a man dressed up" (Interviewho: 5). He invented Daleks to "represent government, officialdom, that unhealing unthinking, blanked-out face of authority that will destroy you because it wants to" (Haining, Key to Time, 21).

The result is a shape like a polygonal salt shaker, over five-and-a-half feet tall, moving on wheels, hidden by the metal hem of its metallic body. It has one arm, one electronic eye, a deadly ray gun and a harsh, mechanical voice. Operational Daleks are maneuvered by men hidden inside. Usually only three of these are used, to save costs. This dollar limit problem is minimized by the TV rectangle's limit: a small number of anything fills the screen. Shooting from different angles, editing in stock footage, and using shells of Daleks—or only shadows cast by cardboard cutouts—gives the impression of an army of monsters.

The Dalek character is a familiar science fiction premise—creatures devoid of human emotion. They represent both chaos (destruction of desirable order) and control (totalitarian rule). As with Time Lords and Gallifrey, they were not explained until long after they entered the series, in the eleventh Dalek story, "Genesis of the Daleks" (1975). The story opens on a harsh, fog-swept landscape where, to ominous slow-paced music in minor chords, soldiers in gas masks move slowly, their uniforms and weapons odd mixtures from different centuries. The Kaleds and Thals, at war for a thousand years, near the end of their resources. The Kaleds' jackboots, decorations, and salutes are modeled on those of the Third Reich. The Doctor begs them to stop the experiments of their chief scientist, Davros, who is developing Daleks, whose name "for a thousand generations . . . will bring fear and terror."

The story shows modern fears as a panoply of science fiction elements fills the small screen. The Doctor is sent by the Time Lords to a severely dystopic planet where people are abused, and a mad scientist creates a perverted man-machine interface.

Crippled by radiation, Davros is confined to an elaborate wheelchair, a design echoed in the Daleks, as are his electronic eye, his one usable arm, and his moral limitations. As the Doctor warns, Davros, "one of the finest scientific minds in existence," is "without conscience, without soul, without pity, and his machines are equally devoid of these qualities."

The Doctor is right: Davros has altered Kaled genetics, evolving a small octopus-shaped being, which cannot survive outside its incubator or its traveling machine. This man-machine interface is the Dalek. The Doctor hesitates to destroy the incubation chamber. Has he the right to kill an intelligent species? What is the proper moral choice?

Davros has no such dilemma. The obligatory confrontation scene shows the ethical dissonance. Would he, asks the Doctor, loose a virus that could kill every living thing in the universe? He would. "To know that life and death on such a scale was my choice. . . . That power would set me above the gods—and through the Daleks I will have that power."

Now the Doctor destroys the incubation chamber, but Daleks are already assembled. They are delayed for many years, but will thrive. "Out of their evil must come something good," he declares, which within the fact is a so far unsupported optimism.

Outside the fact, it is just the ending that fans of the series want. The Daleks' origin is explained; a new and satisfying villain is introduced; and the Daleks can return, as in "Destiny of the Daleks" (1979), to be met by the Doctor and a Time Lord Companion, Romana, whose introduction to the continual threat was reviewed thus: "She found herself in a time-honored role. Horror struck and backed against a wall by who else but the Daleks. It bodes well" (Haining, Key to Time, 191).

THE MASTER

During 1970-1974, the Doctor spent most of his time on Earth, his Tardis disabled for breaking the rules of the Time Lords High Council. The actual reason, during a time of tight budgets at the BBC, was to save costs by using available sets and costumes. Scriptwriter Malcolm Hulke summed up the result, "right, you have only two stories, invasion from outer space and mad scientist" (Dicks 23). Both themes are science fiction staples and within these limits the series continued to employ melodramatic cunning. The most successful example is the combination of invasion and mad scientist, in the person of the Master.

Sedately dapper, exuding charm, the Master conceals ruthless ambition and hubric vanity. His ambition is a science fiction ambition—to rule the universe—and his crimes are science fiction crimes, involving magical technology and alien forces. The principal humanoid villain of the series, like its hero, is an individual. The less humanoid the villains, like the Daleks, the more likely they are to be corporate, working in teams, obeying orders. Part of Doctor Who's attraction for American audiences is its similarity to the American tradition of the individualistic hero, e.g., the Lone Ranger, or Tom Swift, the independent inventor.

In "Terror of the Autons" (1971), the Master, new to the series, is spoken of as an old foe. He plans to help the Autons conquer Earth, then betray them and use Earth as a base for his own ambition. "Vicious, complicated, and inefficient," says the Doctor, "typical of your thinking."

So it is, and sets a pattern. The Master, often in disguise, compels innocents, aligns with villains, or uses deception (or all three), to carry out schemes made needlessly complex by his pride and by his thirst for revenge. He has no friends and betrays any ally. In his vanity, he is surprised when they betray him, and he must defeat his own scheme (sometimes with the Doctor's help) and escape.

Examples from two stories, ten years apart, illustrate the consistent differences between the Holmes and Moriarty of science fiction. In "Colony in Space" (1971), they are captured by a tribe of primitive humanoids and taken to the ruins of a technologically advanced city, now a place of sacrifice—once again, failed technology made into a brutal religion. The Master knows the planet was the home of a great civilization, where "by genetic engineering they developed a super race." The Doctor wonders why "the super race became priests of a lunatic religion, worshipping machines instead of gods." The Master has a more pragmatic goal, to find the super race's Doomsday weapon, as "the very threat of its use could hold the galaxy to ransom"; a "sawmill" of cosmic proportions.

With his grudging respect for the Doctor—"I admire him in many ways . . . I have so few worthy opponents" ("Time Monster" 1972)—he makes, perhaps seriously for once, an offer of alliance. "We're both Time Lords. Both Renegades. We could be masters of the galaxy. Absolute power—power for Good." No, says the Doctor, "absolute power is evil."

This familiar ritualistic discourse is interrupted by the arrival of the Guardian of the weapon, the last survivor of humanoid evolution on the planet. The Master asks that the weapon be released, "it could build a new empire." Did it bring the Guardian's people any good? asks the Doctor, and the answer speaks to a familiar fear in our time: "Once the weapon was built our race began to decay. Radiation from the weapon's power source poisons our planet."

The Master aruges, "We could be gods." "You are not fit to be a god," replies the Guardian, and tells the Doctor how to activate the Destruct mechanism. The city collapses, in another example of low cost special effects: quick zooming in and out, accompanied by de-focusing, shifting the color balance, and shaking the camera. The weapon is destroyed and the Master temporarily frustrated.

The final example, "Logopolis" (1981), celebrates the human mind in the age of computers, despite the sin of pride and the dangers of technology. Logopolis is on a planet located at the edge of our universe. Its inhabitants live a life of mathematics, using computers only for basic calculation. Their glory is Block Transfer Computation, mathematics so sophisticated that it alters the structure of matter. ("Logopolis" is replete with the jargon that endears science fiction to some and drives others away). Computers would be affected; the living brain is immune. The Master, believing a valuable secret to be hidden there, stops the workings of Logopolis to deliver an ultimatum. Unknowingly, he commits "the most dangerous crime in the universe." Because of entropy, the universe is past the point of total collapse; Block Transfer Computation has created temporary Charged Vacuum Emboitments, drawing energy from other universes. Logopolis starts to disappear: the miniature city set crumbles, large stones fall in narrow streets in full-size sets, citizens vanish piece by piece through electronic special effects.

The Master finds himself among the virgins in the path of the sawmill's teeth. Again, the two Time Lords form a necessary alliance. The Master, in a burst of jargon, suggests they "reconfigure both Tardeses into time cone invertors and apply temporal inversion to as much of space/time as we can isolate." But entrophy is too advanced; they must use the radio telescope of the Pharos Project on Earth to send the program to the edge of the universe, accelerated by using the "light speed overdrive" from the Master's Tardis. The Master, still himself, threatens to cancel the program unless all planets submit to his rule. The Doctor thwarts the scheme, but falls from the telescope. The Master escapes.

This story is the final one of the eighteenth season. Tom Baker, who had played the Doctor since 1974, was ready to leave. His exit, the end of the season, and the promise of the series' continuance were blended into a satisfying melodramatic closing scene. The Doctor lies on the ground, visions of enemies and former Companions flashing before his eyes. His current Companions gather around as he says, "It's the end. But the moment has been prepared for." Through the familiar technique of multiple exposures the Doctor regenerates: Tom Baker fades away, Peter Davison fades in, and the fifth Doctor blinks, smiles, and sits up. The closing theme comes in full, and the closing credits roll, listing both Baker and Davison as the Doctor. Villainy is defeated, but lurks; a new Doctor is ready for the next season; and three Companions are on hand to carry through the transition.

Again, a melodramatic ritual has been enacted. Despite death and destruction, the universe is saved. Despite technology, humanity is paramount. Despite danger, Good triumphs, if narrowly, over Evil.

CONCLUSION

Any television genre can, but not necessarily will, function as melodrama, as a ritualized comedy in cautionary celebration of ordinary human character. Situation comedies concentrate on humorous approaches to small-group interpersonal relationships. Their tactics vary with the times, as the success in recent years of "irregular families" shows, for example, the single-parent sitcom (One Day At A Time, Kate and Allie).

Police and private detective series speak to the urban fears of the times, replacing the lone hero and public servant westerns (from Have Gun Will Travel to Magnum, P.I.; from Gunsmoke and Lawman to Kojak and Cagney and Lacey).

The televised drama of science fiction differs from other forms in its tension between the sometimes literally universal scope of a danger to the proper order and the limits of the rectangle and the dollar in bringing that story to the small screen. A world, galaxy, or universe tied to a railroad track is saved by an effort that fits that screen, carried out by a public servant or servants (the crew of the Enterprise), or in the case of Doctor Who, a free individual spirit who goes on his way after solving the problem.

Cawelti argues that to keep culture shaped by "rational humanistic discourse" it is vital to include criticism of the media along with the exploration of "other areas which constitute the major expressions of the human imagination" (377). The writer's argument, backed by the descriptive passages of this essay, is that one approach to such criticism is to find television texts of unusual interest, and that Doctor Who is one of these. Marc found that a problem with television is that "its texts are generally unavailable on demand" (12). In the case of Doctor Who, with the printed materials available (especially Tulloch and Alvarado), and the growing number of stories available on video cassette, the problem does not exist.

Replying to the criticism that television tends to pander to popular taste, Crinkley writes that "popular taste, in its continuing need for order and hope and resolution in its experience is worthy of respect" (32). Perhaps this search for order, hope and resolution in a universe of technological wonders is the key to Doctor Who's success, and a reason to use it in exemplifying media criticism. The series is not only an example of an unusually enduring television vehicle, but, in its insistence on character over impressive effects, is an example of its own message: humanity need neither reject technology nor be a slave to it. More than any other television series to date, Doctor Who, for over twenty years, has dramatized the hopeful caution expression by Barzun "there is no getting away from the machine. It is only the use of it that is in your control" (3).

NOTES

The writer gratefully acknowledges the assistance of John Nathan-Turner, producer of Doctor Who, for allowing access to scripts and tapes; and to Nathan-Turner's secretary, Sara Lee, for assembling the materials and arranging for a quiet viewing room at the BBC.