“In a 1999 British Film Institute poll of television critics and professionals, Doctor Who was voted the third-best British television programme of all time” (Chapman 1). At its 2005 launch, the remade Doctor Who garnered massive viewership, averaging 8 million viewers during its Saturday evening tea time (7 p.m.) slot, constantly beating out what other stations like ITV have to offer (Chapman 187), and it continues to draw record audiences. Running originally from 1963 to 1989, the show managed to become an institution of British life created by the world’s largest and Great Britain’s most “culturally influential institution,” BBC 1 (Tulloch and Alvarado 1). 
In a world with declining roles of territory, monarchy and personal relationships in defining nationality, the “quintessential cultural product,” (Appadurai 161) such as Doctor Who, creates a sense of Britishness that may be more influential than many state institutions. Doctor Who is also one of Britain’s most popular shows in worldwide syndication, and perhaps this is why the show has worked so hard to maintain its version of British identity. Of the many visual signifiers of Britishness, perhaps the TARDIS (Time And Relative Dimension(s) In Space and the Doctor’s time traveling device/spaceship) is most so. By remaining “consistent long after the police telephone box had been phased out,” it “might be seen as ‘a metaphor for the persistence of mid-twentieth century Britishness within the series’” (Chapman 8). So with so much of British identity tied up into this cultural product, what does it mean when, for the first time, the series gains an openly queer companion?
I will attempt here to show how, within the genre of science fiction, the politics of sexuality, and the history of British television, the singular event of queering Doctor Who ultimately matters. I begin defining science fiction and explore how this important part of modern discourse is unfairly dismissed as paraliterary. I will then attempt to put the new series into context with a brief history of Doctor Who, focusing mainly on how it was first created, how the new series came about in 2005, and the role of Russel T Davies in its resurrection. The largest portion of this cultural exploration will be a textual analysis of three episodes of the new series. First, I examine subversive gender classifications in “The Long Game” as a precursor to the more extraordinary two-episode story arc of “The Empty Child” and “The Doctor Dances.” These episodes introduce several layers of sexual discourse in a way that works in a “family” show. Finishing the textual analysis, I will talk about how our queer hero, Captain Jack, has transformed the series. Finally, I will attempt to examine the audiences for Doctor Who and judge its influence on the legitimacy of science fiction, sexual discourse and international culture.
Science Fiction
What is Science Fiction?
The definitions of science fiction are varied and complex. According to (insert definition story here). For example, when I last helped host a panel about ethics in science fiction at Dragon*Con in Atlanta, a discussion about the distinction between fantasy and science fiction became heated and prolonged with no real resolution. However, most can agree that science fiction at least attempts to explain events using, well, science. The trouble in this distinction is largely that once science has advanced far enough, it’s virtually indistinguishable from fantasy. If we continue to accelerate our technological advancement, nothing is impossible.
Perhaps it would be more useful to define science fiction not based on the content of individual texts, but based on what it means to the viewer (Broderick 8). Like fantasy, science fiction is not an exercise in reality. It has no interest in the mundane. Unlike fantasy, science fiction allows the viewer to believe, at least on some level, that this really could happen. It is this supposition that allows the viewer to connect what they see with present-day life. Herein lies the special nature of the genre. It is usually more about today than tomorrow.
The science fiction writer takes the long tradition of thought experiment and does us one better. Where Plato took pains to describe the shape and function of an Ideal State with philosopher kings, the science fiction writer can give it concrete form. For example, Aldous Huxley explores what might happen if an outsider, John the Savage, visits a future London that looks much like Plato’s caste driven Ideal State in Brave New World. Huxley and many others like him use rich detail, fascinating characters and narrative to explore “what if” scenarios. Science fiction writers “have become the new philosophers of our age, as Philip K. Dick once suggested: ‘I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist; my novel & story-writing ability is employed as a means to formulate my perception. The core of my writing is not art but truth’ (In Pursuit, 161)” (Pinsky 11). If this is so, what does it mean when a genre is something more than simple entertainment?
Textual Analysis
“The Long Game”
Outside of the rising sexual tension between the Doctor and Rose, the first mention of subversive sexuality occurs in the 2005 season’s episode seven, “The Long Game.” The TARDIS deposits the adventurers onto Satellite 5 orbiting earth in the year 200,000. Something is amiss as the scene doesn’t match up with the Doctor’s Time Lord knowledge of the era. They soon find out that the station is the news hub for 600 channels across the Human Empire. Using his psychic paper, a plot device that helps to help move the story along, the Doctor convinces Cathica and Suki that he is management and there for an inspection.
As they explain the station’s importance as an information hub, one screen headlines, “Face of Boe expecting Baby Boemina” another, “Solar Flares Rage at 5.9.” These brief flashes give information that is significant later in the show and series. 
For example, we find later that the Face of Boe is in fact male and is apparently pregnant here. They continue the mock inspection and go to watch Cathica direct a broadcasting session.
“Ok, so… Ladies, gentlemen, multi-sex, undecided or robot, my name is Cathica Santini Kadainy. That’s Cathica with a ‘C,’ in case you want to write to Floor 500 praising me, and please…do,” she begins.
Cathica is on her best game and uses politically correct speech that is a common ritual in our professional environments today. The exchange works both as humor and (as with most humor) commentary. The list of participants—ladies, gentleman, multi-sex, undecided or robot—extrapolates to gender what we hear today when talking about sexuality, race and nationality. The categories of multi-sex, undecided and robot disrupts the traditional “male and not-male” binary outlined by Brian Attebery in Decoding Gender in Science Fiction. He argues that science fiction’s ability to explore alternate gender joins current disruptors such as “cross-dressing, homosexuality, and surgical alteration of the body,” that “can serve as a third gender option.”
When the relationship is no longer binary, “it is more difficult to define one sex as the Self and the other as the Other, or one as complete and the other as lacking. Depending on one’s commitment to the existing gender code, such third terms may be seen as dangerous deviance or overdue liberation” (8).
She asks the Doctor, “How do you want it? By the book?”
“Oh, right from scratch, thanks,” he replies.
This one line in Davies’ complex storytelling could easily slip by unnoticed. The fantastic nature of the show allows it to be subversive without being seditious. After all, this is 198,000 years into the future and a television show. The addition of robots pushes the list further into the future. Many queer activists would gladly welcome multi-sexual (as intersexed) and undecided (as gender fluid) to today’s quotidian political nomenclature, but would hesitate to add the depreciative fictional “robot” as a point of humor.
But why should there be a list at all? This “by-the-book” salutation is certainly more inclusive than today’s; but Butler argues in Gender Trouble that gender can’t exist as a state of being; that “[t]here is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results” (33). Even multi-sex and undecided depend on the idea that you can categorize your gender as an element of identity. Cathica could have said instead, “Sentient beings who at the moment are acting ladylike, gentlemanly, multi-sexed, undecided, robotic or not acting at all, my name is….” But the whole thing starts sounding rather silly; it’s much easier to just dispense with it entirely. A longer list fails to avoid the feminist trap of creating proclaiming some gender categories “true and original” and others “false or derivative,” serving only to “produce new forms of hierarchy and exclusion” (Butler viii). We are not able to know if her list is supposed to be representative of humanity in 200,000, because this is not the “correct” 200,000. In fact, this is a “by-the-book” list created by a hegemonic company manipulating all of humanity at the behest of a hostile alien. Taken this way, it’s use is very appropriate and prompts a careful viewer to wonder if identity inclusive political speech can serve anything but a hegemonic purpose.
“The Empty Child”
Our queer hero, Captain Jack, joins Doctor Who in “The Empty Child,” part of a two-episode story written by Steven Moffat that concludes with “The Doctor Dances.” The Doctor and Rose are pulled off course by an emergency “mauve” signal that leads them to London during the 1940 Blitz of WWII. This high-budget story arc with gratuitous special effects won the 2006 Hugo award for Dramatic Presentation: Short Form (Locus Online). The episode blends science fiction, historical drama, and horror as our heroes try to solve several converging mysteries. This blending exemplifies one of the major strengths of the show. This, along with the “regular phoenix-like reincarnation of the Doctor himself” is largely why Doctor Who has been able to survive for so many years (Tulloch and Alvarado 5). We work along side the characters to solve the mysteries of the episode. Where did the alien craft land? What is the alien craft? Who is the strange child in a gas mask haunting the children of London? Why is a strange disease spreading in the sealed off hospital? And finally, who is Captain Jack Harkness?
Captain Jack’s basic character is rapidly established with visual cues and sparse dialogue. He focuses on Rose dangling from a barrage balloon through a first-person shot of binoculars with a digital display. A display that in 1940 London immediately marks him out of place. He zooms in to frame her rear. 
His first words, “Nice bottom,” establishes a level of sexuality in stark contrast with the Doctor. His accent and choice of bottom instead of bum mark him as American. Another male officer is with him and suggests he’s gone mad and asks Captain Jack if they hadn’t better be going. Jack turns around and gives a million dollar Hollywood smile that establishes the character’s charisma. 
He adds another bit of classic Hollywood saying, “Sorry old man. I gotta go meet a girl.” Finally, fully in character but in an unexpected twist, he adds to the officer, “But, you’ve got an excellent bottom too.” This only hints at the character’s fluid sexuality. A queer viewer, jaded by too many false positives, could assume this just a good-natured joke even with the accompanying slap on the ass.
Rose, already in the preposterous situation of hanging over the London Blitz by a rope attached to a balloon, falls and is caught in Captain Jack’s tractor beam. The tractor beam is the first of many sexually suggestive images in the two episodes. And, according to Moffat (the writer), “The gizmos and gadgets with the Doctor and Captain Jack is all about sex. All of it” (“Weird Science”). The tractor beam is angled just so as to suggest a phallic image, and Rose is caught in it. 
Once Rose is safely inside Captain Jack’s spaceship, which looks as much strapped together as the Doctor’s TARDIS, Jack and Rose start a heavy round of flirtation facilitated by a bit of mind-reading psychic paper.
They have a romantic interlude and dance in front of the face of Big Ben as Jack continues to show off his technical prowess. It culminates with a decision to find the Doctor, and when Rose asks how he plans to accomplish that, he replies, “Easy, I’ll just scan for alien tech.” This phrase is signified in the beginning of the episode when Rose asks the Doctor if he’s going to find the alien craft by scanning “for alien tech or something?” He replies that he is just going to ask where a large object fell from the sky, not realizing they had arrived in the middle of a bomb raid. Rose’s attraction to Captain Jack is cemented as she smiles and says in an aside, “Finally, a professional.”
In the next episode, the rivalry between Captain Jack and the Doctor escalates and Captain Jack’s sexuality is more clearly defined.
This Rose centered plot line is an example of the increased agency of Rose in the new series. She is no longer one of the screaming heads of Doctor Who yore, but a proper and leading character. She is a strongly modern woman who is “sassy, streetwise and fashion-conscious” on one hand, and “determined, opinionated and independent” on the other. Her fixation on a character other than the Doctor is unique and establishes her as an equal partner with her own story arcs. Instead of being a simple sidekick, screaming head, or “lady-in-jeopardy” like previous companions, who were often no more important than psychic paper—used to advance the plot—Rose is a prime mover of the show. Also, the decision to cast Billie Piper in the role was a clear indicator that she wasn’t to be just another “Who ‘girl.’” As a former teenie-bopper start and vetted actress, she brought to Rose the same sort of attention that Eccleston did to the Doctor (Chapman 6-7, 191).
The episode ends with Rose and Captain Jack joining the Doctor in the hospital where he has witnessed the gruesome transformation of a human doctor into a gas-mask zombie. The Doctor is suspicious of Captain Jack from the beginning and quickly finds out that he is trying to sell the crashed spacecraft to Rose and the Doctor. He believes they are time agents just as he once was. Under the Doctor’s questioning, we find out that the whole thing is an elaborate con. Captain Jack explains that the ship is nothing but space junk, an old ambulance. He had promised Rose a warship and comes clean only after the Doctor blames him for the spreading gas-mask zombie plague. 
As they argue, a hospital room full of the zombies wake up and surround the trio in a cliffhanger.
“The Doctor Dances”
In “The Doctor Dances” the mystery deepens, and we pick up where the cliffhanger left us. The Doctor, Rose and Captain Jack are surrounded by mask zombies. They must find a way to escape without being touched by the encroaching mob and being turned themselves. The Doctor, in clear “soft” science fiction style, has begun to work out the mystery. The mask zombies are chanting the same mysterious “Are you my mummy?” that is threaded through the previous episode. In his best “grown-up” voice he tells the mob to “Go to your room.” The Doctor, using wit and psychology—not technology—saves them for now. The maneuver sets up the contrast between the Doctor with Captain Jack, very much a master of technology and skilled soldier.
Their continuing conflict represents both sexual competition for Rose (more on this later) and a battle between American and British science fiction sensibilities. In the US, science fiction is much more focused on technical prowess, personal courage and “collective national enterprise” towards a common goal. The Doctor represents “good old-fashioned British invention and ingenuity to step back in time” (Cook and Wright 4-5). Moffat and Davies, in this episode, take what was implicit between the two tropes and gave it life on the screen. Captain Jack even goes so far as to call out “Spock” when looking for the Doctor, enhancing his association with American science fiction, specifically Star Trek, himself being similar to the sexually virile Captain Kirk of the original series.
Much ado is made over Jack’s sonic blaster. It’s digital, powerful, and destructive. The Doctor’s sonic screwdriver is just a simple (if versatile) tool and not really a weapon at all. While the two devices represent ideological differences (force vs. ingenuity), they are also phallic symbols that embody their sexual conflict over Rose. 
The references are knowingly written in by Moffat, and—like the gun play scene in Red River (1948) between Matthew Garth (Montgomery Clift) and Cherry Valance (John Ireland)—the actors’ complicity in the subtext allows the sexual humor to clearly shine in fun and engaging scenes (The Celluloid Closet).
The trio make their way to the observation room that the now-turned human doctor said was the source of zombie breakout. The door is locked, and the Doctor asks Captain Jack to open the door instead of using his sonic screwdriver. Eager to show off, Captain Jack obliges and blasts a neat square section out of the door. The Doctor recognizes the weapon as a sonic blaster created in the weapons factories of Villengar.
Captain Jack explains that the factories are gone now, “The main reactor went critical—vaporized the lot.” The Doctor implies that he destroyed them and mentions that there’s a banana grove there now saying, “I like bananas. Bananas are good.” Rose is impressed by the weapon’s “digital” blast pattern and flirtatiously lets him know. Now in the observation room, they find the wall covered with what appears to be a child’s drawings. This and the recorded message establishes that it’s the small child mask zombie terrorizing London that was the first victim. The child finds them there and when Captain Jack pulls out his blaster to heroically stop the small zombie, he finds himself holding a banana instead, one the Doctor says is from the grove on Villengar. Instead of shooting the child himself (the child is later restored), the Doctor uses the weapon to create an escape route and British ingenuity triumphs.
Upon the return of his blaster, Captain Jack strikes back and shows off his blaster’s ability to undo the blast and restore the wall, leaving the child zombie on the other side.
The boys continue to squabble in the hallway as a new mass of mask zombies surround them. Jack exclaims, “Okay. This can function as a sonic blaster, a sonic cannon, and a triple-enfolded sonic disrupter. Doc, what you got?” After much bickering back and forth, the Doctor finally admits he has only a sonic screwdriver. Meanwhile, Rose has taken the blaster from Jack and created another escape route in the floor. 
While the two men are bickering over who has the best tool, she’s saving the day (or at least the moment), with only a complaint from the Doctor, “Could’ve used a warning!”
The argument immediately resumes with Captain Jack ridiculing the sonic screwdriver and the Doctor defending it. Rose, again concentrating on the matter at hand, moves on to find a light switch. As she finds it and switches it on, they find themselves in another room of newly awakened mask zombies. They rush to the door and Captain Jack tries to blast open the door, his blaster has stopped working. He calls in the Doctor to use his screwdriver instead. He explains, “It’s the special features, they really drain the battery.” Rose responds with an incredulous, “The battery?! How lame,” and her faith in Captain Jack’s technological superiority begins to crack.
They are trapped in a storeroom and—after a bit more bickering about the screwdriver, “Well, I’ve got a banana, and at a pinch you could put up some shelves.”—Captain Jack teleports out in a seemingly cowardly move. He is now an unpredictable character, helping out in one moment and bailing the next. After he returns via radio to explain he’s working to get them out, the Doctor confronts Rose and asks her why she trusts the Captain. She replies, “I trust him ’cause he’s like you. Except with dating and dancing.” It is here that “dancing” starts to develop a clearer sexual meaning. And indeed, every instance of the word or actual dancing in the story can be replaced with sex—including Jack and Rose’s previous interlude in front of Big Ben.
While they wait, the two start a playful exchange where the Doctor seems hurt that she assumes he doesn’t “dance.” The exchange is a reference to the generally asexual nature of the Doctor. Through most of the show’s history, it has been only his human companions who “dance.” Rose drives the point home asking, “Doesn’t the universe implode or something if you…dance?” He replies, “Well, I’ve got the moves but I wouldn’t want to boast.” Rose calls him on his claim and asks him to show her his “moves.” “Come on, the world doesn’t end cause the Doctor dances,” she says. This may be a reference to previous uproar in the fan community about previous attempts to sexualize the Doctor. They begin to flirt and are about to dance when he is distracted by her healed hands, a major clue for solving the mystery. 
The Doctor is back on mission, but Rose tries to draw him back in they get ready to dance. The two don’t notice they’ve been transported to Captain Jack’s ship until he chimes into the conversation. The sequence ends when Captain Jack suggestively tells Rose and the Doctor to carry on with what they were doing. But the Doctor plays ignorant and deflects the issue:
Doctor: [innocently] We were talking about dancing!
Jack: It didn’t look like talking.
Rose: Didn’t feel like dancing.
With this, Moffat gives the viewer the first explicit clue for the dancing metaphor.
While this is happening, we are introduced to a third thread of sexuality. Nancy, local leader of the orphan children of the town, had developed a system of stealing food during air raids while rich families were safely hidden away in bunkers. During the Doctor’s visit, many of her scenes focus on the Lloyd family home. The cupboards are well stocked and the table set lavishly as they descend to the bunker. Everything goes to plan for her and she has raided the house, and the children had eaten well at the table. However, as she begins to take responsibility for her role in the current crisis, she ends up having to confront Mr. Lloyd. She had returns to find supplies and is caught before she’s able to leave.
Mr. Lloyd is full of himself and triumphantly lectures to Nancy. She’s caught, and he’s going to call the authorities to come get her. Besides, he continues, “The sweat on my brow, that food is.” A calm Nancy agrees by noting exactly what a lot of food there was on the table. In fact, she says, “A lot more than on anyone else’s table. Half this street thinks your missus must be messing about with Mr. Avistock—the butcher. But she’s not, is she? You are.” His look of fear is all she needs to make her demands for supplies and the use of their bathroom. 
She finishes her blackmail saying, “Oh, look…there’s the sweat on your brow.”
This is an interesting addition in this particular episode; as 1941s London was still under the same ‘Blackmailer’s Charter’ that Oscar Wilde and Alfred Tayler were prosecuted under in 1895 (David 17). The Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, was passed mostly as a measure to protect women and children from abuse and prostitution. However, an amendment was added, section 11, that “read as follows: ‘Any male person who, in public or in private, commits, or is a party to the commission of, or procures, or attempts to procure the commission by any male person of, any act of gross indecency shall be guilty of misdemeanour, and being convicted shall be liable at the discretion of the Court to be imprisoned for any term not exceeding two years, with or without hard labour’” (David 18). This did not include the execution of an offender’s public reputation. Mr. Lloyd had plenty to make him sweat.
This scene is not essential to the plot. Moffat could have had Nancy steal the supplies without being caught. However, it likely served two purposes. First, it educates the viewer about the realities of homosexuality during the period—which is undermined by the fact that Mr. Lloyd is a hypocritical and unsympathetic character. Second and more essentially, the scene acts as a point of intolerant comparison to the Doctor’s liberal attitudes towards Captain Jack later in the episode. After Nancy’s blackmail, the Doctor’s attitude seems all the more modern and enlightened.
After escaping the hospital, the Doctor, Rose and Captain Jack are looking for a way into the compound guarding the downed spacecraft. 
Nancy is already inside, being held prisoner by a soon to be mask zombie that she holds off by singing it a lullaby. The trio are back outside trying to figure a way in past all the guards, and another thread of sexuality is introduced. Captain Jack mentions that Algy is on duty so it “must be important.” Rose offers to “distract the guard” and Captain Jack tells her that might not be so great an idea. Rose, in character, objects and says she can handle it, but he counters that she’s not Algy’s type and that he’ll distract Algy. He throws back a quick, “Don’t wait up,” just in case they didn’t get the point.
As he walks away, a surprised Rose and the Doctor have a chat:
Doctor: Relax, he’s a 51st century guy. He’s just a bit more flexible when it comes to dancing.
Rose: How flexible?
Doctor: Well, by his time, you lot have spread out across half the galaxy.
Rose: Meaning?
Doctor: [grinning broadly] So many species, so little time…
Rose: What, that’s what we do when we get out there? That’s our mission? We seek new life, and…. and….
Doctor: Dance.
This scene is sexually subversive on many levels. First there’s this idea that fluid sexuality is a natural result of technosocio advancement. Second, the idea that sex can be enjoyed with other species moves sex soundly outside of the puritan realm of procreation and into the realm of diplomatic recreation. It dangles Foucault’s anti-Victorian promise that “[t]omorrow sex will be good again” (7). Instead of sex as a medium to declare the superiority of a particular social form, it becomes “simply another social form” among many (Delany 35). And finally, for all of those watching, including older children who saw through the euphemism, something other than rote heterosexuality exists in the future.
While in the Victorian era sexuality was “entomologized” into minute classifications (Foucault 43), the inclusion of the interspecific into everyday human sexuality by the Doctor breaks down the power structure of sexual discourse. Non-reproductive sex—at least in the 51st century—has not only lost its taboo, but enables—at least in part—humanity’s successful colonization of the galaxy. Also, it seems that humanity no longer wastes its time on the “perpetual spirals of power and pleasure” that come with a system where one group must watch and monitor another’s behavior while the other group constantly tries to evade them (Foucault 45). Captain Jack spends no time in sexual self-examination nor even talks about it directly in the entire Doctor Who franchise. In this post-sexual utopian vision, we see a possible answer to Foucault’s question about the importance of sexual discourse. What happens when organizations like ActUp!, OutRage! and local gay pride organizations accomplish their ultimate goal of making themselves obsolete? The two-way pleasure of the Pride parade marcher and the “God Hates Fags” protester (an exchange I have indulged in) can give way to something more productive—like pretty much anything else.
The 1960s vision of “It’s all Love” is making its way to a future where sexual preferences are no more culturally significant than one’s blood type or favorite food. Based on my limited experience, at least some teenage social groups consider bisexuality to be the baseline from which everyone else deviates. To them, if you haven’t at least experimented with homosexual sex, you’re in a state of denial. And to turn down an offer of sexual play a reasonably attractive friend, is simply rude. I can imagine that if Captain Jack were to be rejected for no better reason than the arrangement of his genitalia, he would be offended as well.
Finally, almost lost in the larger narratives of the piece, is Nancy’s story. We find out that she is both the a cause and a solution to the mask zombie plague. The little boy, patient zero, is first her brother and later admitted to be her son. It is his death during an air raid that starts an army of microscopic robots on a mission to rewrite the human genome and Nancy is his mommy. The shame and stigma attached to teenage pregnancy in 1941 is the root cause of what could have been the end of the human race. With the Doctor’s help, Nancy forgives herself, reclaims her son as her own, and declares, “I am your mommy. I will always be your mommy.” 
Then in an act of narrative magic, the robots (nanogenes) compare her genetic structure to his and realize that the template of a child in a gas mask, broken by war and only half alive, was not the true nature of humanity. In the middle of all this sexual revolution, it’s the acceptance of family, in all its forms, that saves the day.
This forces Captain Jack to deal with the stark reality that he really was ultimately responsible for this crisis. It was the ambulance he crashed into London that contained the nanogenes who found the boy’s broken body. This becomes a moment of transformation for Captain Jack, but it seems to be lost on him as he teleports out. He apparently relapses into his con man ways, getting out before the proverbial “volcano day.” In his absence, the Doctor seems to regain his mastery over events as has persuaded Nancy to do her part to save the day. Part of Captain Jack’s con included a historically scheduled bomb that will drop momentarily (he intended to sell it just before it’s destroyed). Jack is gone and Rose asks the Doctor what they should do about it. He explains that it’s taken care of. “How?” “Psychology.”
On cue, Captain Jack reappears in the tractor beam with the bomb. In a final bit of phallic metaphor, he is straddling the massive bomb between his legs at an upwards angle. It’s as if Captain Jack can’t even save the day without something huge between his legs. He tells Rose goodbye, pops back to commend her Union Jack T-shirt, and heads into space. Jack uses his impressive technology again, but this time with a greater purpose. He doesn’t leave on volcano day: he’s been influenced by the Doctor to become more than he was (a common theme in Doctor Who). Conversely, the Doctor regains his technical mastery. He gathers up the nanogenes and explains to Rose, “Software patch. Gonna email the upgrade. You want moves, Rose? I’ll give you moves.” The nanogenes gather up around him and he swirls the brightly lit particles and sends them forward to repair the other damaged victims. The heroic parallels between the Doctor and Captain Jack become clear. They influence each other and use technology, cleverness and compassion to save the day. What’s more, just this once, according to the Doctor, “Everybody lives!”
Back on the spaceship, we get a better look into the character of Captain Jack accompanied by a live bomb and an unhelpful computer. He manages to have a lively conversation with a computer which does nothing but tell him he’s certain to die. As he concludes that there’s no way out, he’s forced to initiate “emergency protocol four-one-seven.” In almost cheerful voice, the computer responds with, “Affirmative.” And a contextually complex martini is materialized in a special effect cribbed from Star Trek: The Next Generation. The combination suggests a play on Captain Picard’s prototypical cup of Earl Grey. The choice of martini also has at least two interpretations. It is James Bond’s preferred drink, and there are certainly elements Bond in Captain Jack’s character. 
However the exaggerated plastic martini glass evokes homosexual tropes as well. So in the end, he’s an archetypical science fiction hero; he’s Captains Kirk and Picard from Star Trek, James Bond, and finally the Doctor.
Just before the bomb is to explode, he tells the computer a story about the last time he was sentenced to death and ended up in bed with both of his executioners. “Lovely couple. We stayed in touch. Can’t say that about most executioners,” he finished. He says farewell to the computer and then the TARDIS (just small enough to fit on board) appears to rescue him from certain death—a forgivable cliché. Rose is busy trying to teach the Doctor how to dance and making a muck of it. When Captain Jack is welcomed to the TARDIS, he states it’s much bigger on the inside on cue, and the Doctor responds with a rather unexpected, “You’d better be.”
As if to rescue him from a faux pas, Rose explains that what he really meant was that he could cut in (and save her from the Doctor’s terrible dancing). Before they can start dancing, Captain Jack again serves as a catalyst for the Doctor and he suddenly remembers how to dance. Rose replies, “Actually Doctor, I thought Jack might like to have this dance.”
“I’m sure he would, Rose. I’m absolutely certain. But who with?” says the Doctor without skipping a beat.
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