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One of my favorite things about Russell T. Davies’s run in Doctor Who is the way the series frequently addresses class issues and the effect that they have on the lives of the characters, from Rose and her mother living on a council estate to Lady Christina de Souza stealing out of boredom in “Planet of the Dead.” The Doctor has a complicated relationship with money. While he uses his sonic screwdriver to steal money from cashpoints in “The Long Game” and “The Runaway Bride,” he sometimes expects his companions to buy him things because he hasn’t any money, like when he has Rose buy them chips in “The End of the World” and has Martha work as a shopgirl to support them both in “Blink.” In “The Girl in the Fireplace,” he sums it up unhelpfully: “I was always a bit vague about money.”
There are a number of Davies episodes that explicitly address social class (“Gridlock,” “Planet of the Dead,” and “The Runaway Bride” stand out), but “Voyage of the Damned” is the best at depicting class conflict and the destructive effects of capitalist greed. It is the only episode in all of the new series to seriously deal with the class identity of the Doctor, urging the audience to question his representation of himself as poor and his identification with working-class characters. His representation of himself would have you believe he’s a poor vagrant traveler, as we can see when he meets the charming Astrid Peth:
Astrid Peth: So you travel a lot?
The Doctor: All the time. Just for fun. Well. That's the plan. Never quite works.
Astrid: Must be rich though.
The Doctor: Haven't got a penny. (whispers) Stowaway.
Astrid: Kidding?
The Doctor: Seriously!
Astrid: No!
The Doctor: Oh yeah.
This conversation neatly demonstrates the contradiction between how the Doctor imagines himself in relation to class and money and the reality of his life. Sure, he technically hasn’t got a penny. But wealth doesn’t just buy the upper class stuff. It provides power and choices that the rest of us just don’t have access to: a good education, increased physical mobility, connections with powerful people, and socialization that gives them confidence in their ability and right to impact the world around them. Astrid doesn’t have any of these things and the Doctor has all of them. Much of what he has access to is stolen (money, the TARDIS), but he doesn’t have to worry about being punished for that theft, like an actual working-class person would have to. And he certainly won’t ever have to get a humiliating job with a humiliating uniform just to travel, as Astrid does. He simply doesn’t face the same reality, because she is working class and he is...something else.
***
In this episode, clothing is the primary visual marker of class. While the rich, upper-class characters and extras wear elegant gowns and tuxedos, the working-class characters are quite conspicuous in their dress: Astrid in her French maid outfit, the Von Huffs in their garish purple country Western costumes, and even Mr. Copper, whose drab suit stands out in the black tie crowd. The Doctor’s own outfit, a nice black tuxedo paired with well-worn black Converse shoes, is visually confusing; he is marked both as upper-class and lower-class. This outfit reads to much of the fandom as quirky and relatable, but it also visually represents the Doctor’s ambiguous relationship with class. As a privileged person with access to power, money, and status, is he upper-class or an impoverished traveler and stowaway? Astrid seems to think that his claim that he’s poor is overblown, and pokes fun at his representation of himself when she tells him “You might be a Time King from Gaddiby, but you still need to eat.” The mislabeling of “Time Lord” seems purposeful here; it calls attention to the fact that the name of the Doctor’s species suggests an upper class position and access to power. But her teasing “you still need to eat” suggests that no matter his privilege and power, he’s still like her (and every other person) in important ways. To use a cliche, he still has to put his pants on one leg at a time.
Despite the way the Doctor positions himself as common, he also realizes that part of his appeal for working-class companions is the ability to escape the constraints of their class position. When he is describing his travel to Astrid, trying to lure her into becoming a companion, he says, “Imagine it: no tax, no bills, no boss. Just the open sky.” The appeal for her (and, I would argue, for Rose and Donna) is that traveling with the Doctor would allow her to leave her class position, and the way that it limits her actions and opportunities, behind. The Doctor would allow her to escape money, and the socioeconomic structures that keep her from the adventure she wants, altogether.
***
In “Voyage of the Damned,” issues of class and money are at the forefront, starting with the name of the cruise ship, the Titanic. The sinking of the Titanic is a disaster famous for the way that class impacted its survivors and victims. Despite the “women and children” first policy, first class men had a much better survival rate than third class children. James Cameron’s 1997 film version solidified our cultural understanding that the Titanic disaster was greatly impacted by class; there’s a particularly horrifying scene in which steerage passengers beg the ship’s staff to let them out from behind a locked gate in order to board the lifeboats, and the staff refuses. Meanwhile, water rushes toward those waiting at the gate and the lifeboats are leaving the ship at only half their capacity.
The use of the Titanic in this episode evokes an association with class inequality, a dominant theme in “Voyage of the Damned,” in which Astrid works in the service industry to get a chance to see “another sky,” Foon Van Hoff desperately enters a contest 5,000 times to get something luxurious, Mr. Copper tries to escape the tedium of the life of a traveling salesman by lying about his credentials, and Max Capricorn intends to murder billions for corporate revenge, then sail off with his riches to a pleasure planet. It’s a drama about the destructive force of capitalist greed and the desperate strategies used by the poor to attempt to have a better life, and it, fittingly, doesn’t have a happy ending. Sure, Capricorn’s plan of mass murder doesn’t succeed, but Rickston Slade walks away richer than ever. And Mr. Copper survives with money and a chance at a new life, but Astrid Peth, Morvin and Foon Van Hoff, and Bannakaffalatta all die. The bad guy is defeated, but this is not a celebratory, “everybody lives” episode. That would be too pat, and would suggest that if the Doctor (or, more accurately, Astrid) defeats Capricorn, the entire system of class inequality is also defeated. Capricorn didn’t create that system, in which the haves are increasingly privileged and isolated from the consequences of their actions, and the have-nots are exploited and sometimes sacrificed for the greed of others; that system created Capricorn. So destroying Capricorn doesn’t make the class system implode. and the mixed ending of the episode doesn’t let the audience feel that way.
Of course, we can always expect the Doctor to be on the side of the righteous, but the unfinished feeling at the end of this episode is appropriate. It’s a grim reminder that one man (even an extraordinary one) can’t topple class inequality for us. Becoming an accidental millionaire á la Mr. Copper isn’t a workable solution; you can’t fight inequality by trying to pull everyone up to the level of the privileged. Instead, we are left with the feeling that there is something else to be done. What that is, is really up to us.