Doctor Who: 25 time periods Thirteen and Team TARDIS should visit
By Lacy Baugher
This is the artwork on the first edition dustcover of “The Beautiful and Damned”, published in 1922, with the characters of Anthony and Gloria drawn to resemble Fitzgerald and Zelda. (Photo: By William Ely Hill (1887-1962) – ABE Books, Public Domain)
New York City, United States (1920s)
Prohibition-era America is known for many things, including gangsters, bathtub gin, and seriously fabulous clothes. (Seriously, half the reason this time period is on this list is solely for the opportunity to see Yaz and Thirteen in flapper garb or Ryan and Graham dressed like Bugsy Malone. Let me have this, show.)
This particular time period was full of change, as women became more independent, gaining access to many things we take for granted nowadays like contraception and the right to vote. The rise of the Jazz Age brought about all kinds of cultural changes in music, literature and art. So much of American life was infused with a new vitality and vibrancy that we look back on it now as something almost akin to a magical time in our history, where everything glittered and shone. Think The Great Gatsby on steroids.
Historical people we could meet: F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda. Fitzgerald is best known as the author of the aforementioned Gatsby, but he wrote several other famous novels set in his own time period (and largely based on snippets from his own life and marriage), including This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and the Damned. While the Fitzgeralds’ marriage was certainly interesting and dramatic – they were famous for drinking too much, behaving badly at parties, and fighting with one another – it’s Zelda’s story we probably deserve to see.
Potential adventures: It seems lazy to connect so many possible stories to the fact that the Doctor’s a woman now, but there are also so many new tensions at play that have never been present before because of this fact. It’s hard not to imagine that this particular version of the Doctor might have something to say to a woman whose husband regularly plagiarized her diaries and refused to acknowledge her own talents as a writer. Justice for Zelda!