The Girl Who Died, by Tom Marshall

This is the Black Archive monograph about the Peter Capaldi story from his middle season which introduces Maisie Williams (also Arya in Game of Thrones) as Viking warrior girl Ashildr, who dies in the course of the story and is resurrected by the Doctor. I didn’t write the TV story up at the time of watching, though I did enjoy it. I felt it blended humour with drama, and enjoyed the knowing subversion of tropes about Vikings and other classic fantasy themes.

Also I am a big fan of Williams, whose scenes with Charles Dance in the second season of Game of Thrones, were truly electrifying; they were filmed when she was 14.

As it happened, I had visited the Doctor Who studio in Cardiff just a couple of weeks before The Girl Who Died was shown, and bits and bobs from the story were still around, notably the Viking ship which I thought was a bit small (as indeed turns out to be the point).

Tom Marshall has taken a story about which there isn’t frankly, all that much to say, and projected onto it his own strong interest in Norse folklore and its reception. This kind of approach has been tried by a number of previous Black Archives, but it’s rarely very successful in my view. Luckily this is one of the exceptions, as Marshall unpacks not only the story’s portrayal of the Vikings but also our understanding of them, veering into the political side of the topic without losing touch with Doctor Who.

To be honest, I’m feeling a bit lazy, so I’m (mostly) cutting and pasting the chapter summaries from Marshall’s introduction, which frames the book as exploring the story’s navigation between Vikings and humour.

Chapter 1 examines how the story deviates from the typical popular culture take on Vikings and assumptions about both heroic masculinity and history itself.

Chapter 2 looks at the story’s championing of playful, irreverent humour in the face of toxic masculinity, especially in the context of the modern-day far right’s unhealthy obsession with Vikings.

Chapter 3 delves into the multiple ways in which the Doctor and the mythological Óðinn resemble each other, and to what extent this illuminates the former’s depiction here as a healer-trickster. Here is its second paragraph, with the quote it introduces:

Why might the Doctor choose to impersonate Odin specifically, rather than another Norse god such as Freyr or Þórr? His choice is far from random; indeed, there is a long history of comparisons between the two. Setting to one side Hartnell’s categorising of his character as a ‘wizard’ and other nods in this direction over the years³, the Doctor was first explicitly compared to the wizard-like god Óðinn as early as 1988, even before the seventh Doctor’s Odinic qualities manifested in TV stories drawing on Norse mythology such as The Greatest Show in the Galaxy and The Curse of Fenric, not to mention the appearance of explicitly Odinic imagery in the novel Timewyrm: Revelation (1991). Writing that the Doctor ‘is the best possible example of the shaman, the wizard-king, the wise magician’, James L Hodge grants that any comparisons with the Arthurian Merlin are ‘not too far off’⁴ but sees Norse mythology as providing an even more apt analogue:

‘the most potent wizard, king of the gods, master-by-force-of-knowledge-and-intellect is none other than Odin, chief of the Norse gods […] Odin has concentrated on mastery of lore, acquisition of knowledge, and a forewarning of the future. He rules more by the power of what he knows, and can therefore do, than by his physical power […] Just so, the [Doctor] confronts opponent after opponent whose arrogant plans go aground on some esoteric reef of the [Doctor]’s immense, technical knowledge’.⁵

³ E.g., Ben Jackson bluffing that the Doctor is a wizard in The Smugglers (1966) episode 2, or the description of the Doctor as ‘the great wizard Quiquaequod’ in The Dæmons (1971) episode 4. He is also regularly described as a ‘magician’ in The Time Warrior, a story to which The Girl Who Died bears some resemblance.
⁴ Amusingly, Hodge’s article appeared around 18 months before the revelation that a future incarnation of the Doctor was fated to become Merlin in Battlefield (1989). For more on the Doctor’s connections with Merlin, see Purser-Hallard, Philip, The Black Archive #34: Battlefield.
⁵ Hodge, James L, ‘New Bottles – Old Wine: The Persistence of the Heroic Figure in the Mythology of Television Science Fiction and Fantasy’, Journal of Popular Culture 21:4, p40 (emphasis in original).

Chapter 4 deals with the titular ‘girl’, Ashildr, and particularly with the way her transgressive gender identity contributes to the story’s queer subtext.

Chapter 5 draws these strands together in an analysis of the episode’s denouement: not only the means by which the alien threat is defeated, but also the Doctor’s morally complex act of resurrecting Ashildr.

An appendix looks at the link between the baby’s speech, as reported by the Doctor, and the normal metre of Norse poetry.

As I said, I found this a satisfying read, slightly to my surprise. You can get it here.

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The Girl Who Died, by Tom Marshall

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