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Law, the Digital and Time: The Legal Emblems of Doctor Who

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Abstract

This article is about time. It is about time, or more precisely, about the absence of time in law’s digital future. It is also about time travelling and the seemingly ever-popular BBC science fiction television series Doctor Who. Further, it is about law’s timefullness; about law’s pictorial past and the ‘visual baroque’ of its chronological fused future. Ultimately, it is about a time paradox of seeing time run to a time when time runs ‘No More!’ This ‘timey-wimey’ article is in three parts. The first part looks to a hazy remembered past of the legal emblem tradition as presented in Peter Goodrich’s Legal Emblems and the Art of Law to learn visual literacy and also to glimpse the essential elements of modern legality with authority, decision and violence. The second part maps how these images and icons of modern legality are manifest in the Doctor Who fiftieth year anniversary special ‘The Day of the Doctor.’ The third stage looks beyond these first order meanings to understand the chronological chaos of ‘The Day of the Doctor.’ The technicity of the image as a portal through time and space that the narrative revolves around charts the implications for the digital end of time for law.

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Notes

  1. Goodrich takes the plate from poet, satirist and pamphleteer George Wither’s 1635 collection [100: 43]. Wither is not the artist responsible for the image. His contribution was English verses to accompany the images produced by Gabriel Rollenhagen.

  2. The show was placed in a ‘production halt’ after the 1989 season and only recommenced as a production by BBC Wales in 2005.

  3. There are many recent book length studies into Doctor Who [18, 38, 47, 55, 79].

  4. That the Daleks survived their supposed destruction along with Gallifrey was a continual theme in Doctor Who episodes with the Ninth (Christopher Eccleston), Tenth and Eleventh Doctor facing the old enemy [3,4,5, 37, 40, 41, 50, 81, 82].

  5. The Second Doctor in ‘The War Games’ [65] and the Sixth Doctor in the 1986 season long arc ‘Trial of a Time Lord’ [21, 62,63,64]. On the absence of ‘law properly called’ signifiers in Doctor Who see [92: chapter 6].

  6. A phrase used by the Moment in ‘The Day of the Doctor’ to describe the arrival of the Tenth and Eleventh Doctors’ TARDIS but commonly associated in novelisations of Doctor Who scripts by Terrance Dick in the 1970s and 1980s.

  7. The full phrase ‘reverse the polarity of the neutron flow’ is popularly associated with the Third Doctor (Jon Pertwee), although only uttered by him in one episode [9].

  8. Said by the Second Doctor to the Third Doctor in ‘The Three Doctors’ [66].

  9. ‘Timey-wimey’ formed part of the Tenth Doctor’s speech in Steven Moffat scripted 2007 episode ‘Blink’ [59]. The full quote is:

    People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff.

    It has become something of a aca-fan catchcry, see [54, 96, 98].

  10. [87, 180] See also [92: chapter 3].

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  1. Griffith Law School/Law Futures Centre, Griffith University, Gold Coast, Australia

    Kieran Tranter

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Tranter, K. Law, the Digital and Time: The Legal Emblems of Doctor Who . Int J Semiot Law 30, 515–532 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-017-9522-0

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