#38: Donna Noble and the Lone Hero

8 June 2022

Hi! In the last month I have a) moved out of New Haven and back to Chicago b) moved out of my Chicago apartment and into a HOUSE and c) gotten not one but two multi-day, non-COVID illnesses that involved fevers. I am...exhausted, and haven't read or written or done that much thinking.

What I have done, though, is watch TV. In Connecticut, in a fit of boredom, I took my long solo evenings and started re-watching Dr. Who, a show I had started watching in college and kind of stopped watching at the dawn of the Peter Capaldi regeneration. In this re-watch, I'm in the middle of my favorite era, which is to say season 4, with David Tennant as the Doctor and Catherine Tate as his companion Donna Noble.

For those of you who didn't have a comfort-TV hokey sci-fi era that precisely overlapped with mine, Dr. Who is a show about a time-and-space traveling wizard...alien...person who travels in a telephone box across all of time and space with a human companion, usually a woman inexplicably from earth circa the early 2000s. It started in the 1960s as an educational show for children on BBC, about history and science, and I think by the early-aughts reboot it was vaguely educational (there's an entire episode about the life and times of Madame de Pompadour which also involves creepy clockwork robots) but mostly about delightful campy sci-fi.

It's a fun show, there's a lot of catchphrases and running around and hair-breadth escapes and its also a show a lot about feelings--mostly grief, and fear, and trust and love and giving people (defined loosely) the opportunity to be their better selves. The dynamic between Doctor and companion is meant to illustrate this--the Doctor, a semi-immortal, auto-regenerating infinite being who is both full of wonder at the universe and also the infinitely sad, infinitely tired last of his kind, and his companion, a wide-eyed, wondering human, new to the wideness of the universe. This brings me to the reason I love Donna, particularly.

When we meet her, Donna is a temp at a fancy anonymous firm in downtown London. We're given to understand that she's the kind of person who, in an alternate universe, is more likely to have the Kardashian's birth charts to memory than to actually understand how the solar system works. Her character is introduced in a Christmas-special one-off, where her very ordinariness makes her the subject of mockery, both within and by the show itself. Through her adventures with the Doctor, she becomes a bigger, better person, her eyes opened to the vastness of the universe, to the wide diversity of entities that deserve her compassion and kindness. She's always chatting with the person who is on the outskirts of whatever band has assembled to prevent a planet from exploding/Vesuvius from erupting/an alien invasion. She's kind, and bossy, and quick to anger, and is, as she loves to say "a temp from Chiswick." And even with all this, she's described a few times as "the most important woman on earth."

In case you've got your own Dr. Who marathon scheduled to welcome in Ncuti Gatwa as the 14th Doctor (!!!), I won't get into the intricacies of Donna's entire storyline, and spoilers, but here's the crux of it: Donna is the most important woman on earth because she saves the planet, and the price she has to pay for this is to become her own, unexceptional self once again.

Dr. Who loves a "chosen one" storyline, loves the kind of story where one single person is enough to make all the difference, where one person's bravery or cowardice or traumatic past is enough to alter the course of history. As I've probably talked about here before, in my line of work, this is such a seductively beautiful idea--that instead of hundreds, thousands of people slogging against a system that seems to be so large, so all-encompassing, so overwhelming with seemingly no one propping it up, one person can just stand up and Make a Difference, save the day, save the world, save a species.

I'm back to full-time work as of last week, right at the apex of fundraising season, which it shouldn't totally surprise you to know is not...my favorite part of my job. I know it's important, I know it literally pays my salary and keeps the lights on and pays the rent at an office where dozens of people come each week to work through life-changing cases, but I hate convincing very wealthy people that the work we do is worth a tiny percentage of the salaries they hold. Immigration news this week has been not-good-and-not-bad, the same kind of demoralizing hold pattern that is quiet enough to let our policy team raise concerns like "hey, it turns out immigration detention is atrocious for people's mental health" to a government office that may end up conducting an investigation, but a lot of the difference we can make with CRCL complaints is the press hits we get around them.

I fucking wish a temp from Chiswick or a man in a blue box would stand up on a table somewhere with all the right people in the room and bellow out a line written in some snappy writers' room or go back into history and ensure John Tanton got into like, birdwatching instead of funding anti-immigration work, and suddenly boom, no detention, no bureaucracy to immigrate, just families together. It's such a nice view of history, of the way things might be, a cheat code to a better world.

But, it's important to note, Dr. Who is a children's show. When the Chosen One/Great Man of History trope is sold to children, the lesson it gives is that you, yes you, even if you do wake up 10 years hence and are not living the life you imagined yourself to be living, if you're a shopgirl, or a trainee doctor slogging through med school, or a temp in Chiswick, or a kiss-o-gram, or a nurse, you can still make a difference, you can still be important and shining and bright, anyone can save the day. It is good for children to imagine themselves able to access world-changing amounts of power, because let me tell you as an adult a whole lot of the cool stuff comes down to just having the nerve, the thought you might be able to do the thing, to feeling as if you have the power to change your life, nevermind the world.

As an adult though, the Great Man of History is a great way of getting you off the hook. Even as a shopgirl or a temp, you know you're not in a position to change things, history happens largely outside your remit, you know, pushing items across a scanner or papers across your desk. The thing is, it doesn't require you to be a Great Man of History to actually change things--if you give just a little of your attention, a little of your energy to the world, in addition to all the attention and energy it requires to keep body and soul together and presentable and comfortable, it's possible to change things, even if just for a few people. It's still about the nerve, but also about recognizing the extraordinary effort it takes to wash all your dishes sometimes, or unpack your suitcase when you're home from a trip, or to make a spreadsheet or call your senator or figure out how you're going to get a ton of canned food and diapers to your neighbors or get someone out of jail.

I had a meeting recently to volunteer with an org I'm really excited about--the Midwest Immigration Bond Fund. They're a bunch of people, mostly with jobs like mine, who noticed the lack of a bond fund to help folks get out of immigration detention in the Midwest. None of them are particular experts on bond funds, or fundraising, or anything like that (a lot of them are immigration advocates and attorneys) but they saw a missing piece and they got up the nerve to pull something really cool together that, in its two years existence, has literally actually gotten adults out of immigration detention and reunited with their families. Not great men of history, not people standing on a table and hollering, no time travel, just some people with a willingness to figure it out as they go who are actually changing history, one person at a time. You can join them.