Twelfth Doctor (2014-2017)

LISTEN
A year before Heaven Sent, Listen (2014) offered an equally clear deconstruction of the 12th Doctor’s identity as a man playing a role he has created. Dewi Small interrogates the story using Freud’s ideas of the Uncanny and the Unconscious, and asks what, exactly, this Doctor is afraid of.
KILL THE MOON
A contentious episode provoking passionate responses, Kill the Moon (2014) straddles the divides between science fiction and fantasy, optimism and pessimism, masculinity and femininity, as film and TV critic Darren Mooney elucidates.
DARK WATER / DEATH IN HEAVEN
Dark Water and Death in Heaven (2014) took Doctor Who further than ever into the realm of the metaphysical. Philip Purser-Hallard expounds on the story’s place in the series’ ongoing narrative, its seasonal treatment of remembrance and death, and the radical reinvention of its villain.
THE GIRL WHO DIED
The Girl Who Died (2015) blends Norse mythology and Medieval trappings with modern farce and whimsy. It shifts adeptly between these different registers, in a manner that Tom Marshall explains recalls certain Viking sagas and poems.
FACE THE RAVEN
In the first of a triptych of Black Archive volumes looking at the three-part 2015 season finale, Sarah Groenewegen explores themes of death and sacrifice, mortality and memory in Face the Raven, together with the symbolism of ravens and the tradition of the ‘hidden London’ story in fantasy.
HEAVEN SENT
In the second of our triptych looking at the 2015 season finale, Kara Dennison analyses Heaven Sent from a Jungian point of view, examining the meaning of the various rooms in the castle, the treatment of confession, and whether the Doctor has become a persona rather than a character.
HELL BENT
In the third of our triptych looking at the 2015 season finale, Alyssa Franke examines Hell Bent, an intensely feminist story which challenges the primacy of the Doctor’s character arc, and his masculine tendency to impose his own forms of closure on the women he travels with.