Cult TV Heroines: Angels, Aliens and Amazons 9781350163904, 9781350163935, 9781350163911

Citation preview

Cult TV Heroines

Cult TV Heroines Angels, Aliens and Amazons Catriona Miller

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 Paperback edition published 2022 Copyright © Catriona Miller, 2020 Catriona Miller has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. Cover design by Charlotte Daniels Cover image: Diana Rigg in The Avengers (© Courtesy Everett Collection / Mary Evans) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Miller, Catriona, 1968- author. Title: Cult TV heroines angels, aliens and Amazons / Catriona Miller. Description: London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2020007775 (print) | LCCN 2020007776 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350163904 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350163911 (pdf) | ISBN 9781350163928 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Heroines on television. | Women on television. | Cult television programs | Characters and characteristics on television. | Fantasy television programs–History and criticism. Classification: LCC PN1992.8.W65 M55 2020 (print) | LCC PN1992.8.W65 (ebook) | DDC 808.2/2509352–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020007775 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020007776 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-6390-4 PB: 978-1-3501-9417-5 ePDF: 978-1-3501-6391-1 eBook: 978-1-3501-6392-8 Typeset by Integra Software Solutions Pvt., Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of illustrationsvii Prelude: The Thirteenth Doctor1 1

The Cult TV composite9 The external environment: Business, technology and audiences10 The text: Genre, fantasy and liminal space14 The internal environment: Analytical psychology26 Heroines and autonomy36

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Two heads are better than one43 The Avengers (1965–8, ITV)44 Sapphire & Steel (1979–82, ITV)51 The X-Files (1993–2002, 2016–18, Fox)58

3 Witches: Between feminine and feminist67 Bewitched (ABC, 1964–72)75 Charmed (The WB, 1998–2006)82 American Horror Story: Coven (FX, 2013)90 Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (Netflix, 2018–2020)95 4

Warrior women105 Wonder Woman (ABC/CBS 1975–9)111 Xena: Warrior Princess (Renaissance Pictures, 1995–2001)115 Buffy the Vampire Slayer (20th Century Fox, 1997–2003)121 Wynonna Earp (Syfy, 2016–2021)129

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Hybrid evolutions139 The Bionic Woman (NBC, 1976–8)141 Dark Angel (Fox, 2000–2)148 Jessica Jones (Netflix, 2015–19)153

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Contents

A question of command161 Star Trek: Voyager (CBS, 1995–2001)171 Star Trek: Discovery (CBS All Access, 2017–ongoing)180

Coda: To boldly go …191 Notes194 References195 Index210

List of illustrations 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Doctor Who, Spyfall (12.1) The Avengers, The Town of No Return (4.1) Sapphire & Steel, Assignment 6 (6.4) The X-Files, Ghouli (11.5) Bewitched, Long Live the Queen (4.1) Charmed, Lost and Bound (4.12) American Horror Story: Coven, The Seven Wonders (3.13) Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, An Exorcism in Greendale (1.6) Wonder Woman, The Return of Wonder Woman (2.1) Xena: Warrior Princess, Callisto (1.22) Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Something Blue (4.9) Wynonna Earp, War Paint (3.12) The Bionic Woman, On the Run (3.22) Dark Angel, Pilot (1.1) Jessica Jones, AKA Three Lives and Counting (2.11) Star Trek: Voyager, Caretaker (1.1) Star Trek: Discovery, The Wolf Inside (1.11)

4 49 56 63 79 81 94 102 114 118 124 134 146 150 158 173 183

Prelude: The Thirteenth Doctor

In October 2018, to a UK audience of 8.2 million, a new Cult TV heroine crashed through the roof of a train in Sheffield. With a ‘bit of adrenaline, dash of outrage and a hint of panic … ’ (Episode 11.1)1 the new Doctor had arrived. Doctor Who is one of the longest-running Cult TV shows and follows the adventures of the maverick Doctor, an alien Time Lord who travels through time and space righting wrongs, fighting tyranny, saving humanity from alien invaders accompanied by an ever-changing group of mostly human ‘companions’. However, the true genius of the format lies in the ability of the Doctor to regenerate, thus opening the door to the role being played by a series of actors and offering the audience fresh faces, new quirks of character and a clean(ish) narrative slate. It is not just the Doctor who regenerates, but the whole show. Doctor Who was created by the BBC in 1963 and was originally intended to be a children’s history programme. However, it morphed into a family-oriented drama and became something that can reasonably be called ‘the most influential fantasy series in television history’ (Chapman, 2002, p. 2), developing over the years into an increasingly jumbled tangle of narratives and characters. Star Trek is the other foundational show that can lay claim to ‘cult’ status, but while the original Star Trek folded after only three series, Doctor Who remained in production for twenty-six years (Chapman, 2013, p. 2), although by the late 1980s it was fading in popularity and rapidly heading towards a parody of itself and in 1989 the BBC pulled the plug. There was an attempted revival in 1996 aimed at the American market, but as its American reception was described as ‘lukewarm at best’ (Chapman, 2013, p. 182), it remained in limbo until 2005 when it was rebooted once more, with a new Doctor and a refreshed format, to critical acclaim and renewed audiences around the world. The 2005 reboot, overseen by writer/executive producer Russell T Davies, created faster, noisier and bigger stories than ever before which carefully

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managed to combine the affection and nostalgia of those who had grown up with the Doctor, with younger audiences’ expectations in terms of speed, budget and quality. No doubt the successful combination of the new and the old was in part due to the number of self-confessed fans amongst the writers, directors and stars of the show (e.g. Davies himself, Mark Gatiss, Steven Moffat, Chris Chibnall, David Tennant and Peter Capaldi). The show was an immediate hit with audiences at home and internationally, introducing the ninth regeneration of the Doctor in the form of ‘northern’, leather jacket wearing Christopher Eccleston. Then in succession came a skinny, hyperactive tenth Doctor played by David Tennant; a much younger, Fez wearing eleventh Doctor, played by Matt Smith; and the guitar playing, dark glasses wearing twelfth Doctor, Peter Capaldi. All, of course, are variations of white British men. There was, however, something different about the Thirteenth Doctor, played by Jodie Whittaker. She was a woman. The casting decision caused far more debate amongst fans of the show than the youth of Smith, or the age of Capaldi. As Variety reported, ‘to some, this female Doctor is way overdue; to others, it represented a concession to wokeness2 [sic] by denigrating a classic character’ (Framke, 2018), but the new showrunner Chris Chibnall had already signalled that there would be changes even as his vision for the series was taking root. It was, he said, to be ‘incredibly emotional’, with ‘stories that resonate with the world we’re living in now, and I wanted it to be the most accessible, inclusive, diverse season of Doctor Who that the show has ever done’ (Itzkoff, 2018). However, in her first interview after the announcement Whittaker tried to put the fans’ minds at rest, saying, ‘I want to tell the fans not to be scared by my gender. Because this is a really exciting time, and Doctor Who represents everything that’s exciting about change. The fans have lived through so many changes, and this is only a new, different one, not a fearful one’ (BBC, 2017) – a sentiment that was echoed several times in the first episode of Series 11, The Woman Who Fell to Earth, for example in the Doctor’s plea to new companion Graham (Bradley Walsh): ‘Don’t be scared’, she says. ‘All of this is new to you and new can be scary. Now we all want answers. Stick with me and you might get some’, she finishes firmly, surely an address to the audience as much as to the character. Many fans were certainly pleased to have a female Doctor, but some were not so sure and some were downright hostile. They were not long in making their feelings clear via social media, where #notmydoctor began circulating on Twitter and Instagram. As one Twitter user put it, ‘#DoctorWho died today. He didn’t die nobly as you might expect. He was murdered by Political Correctness’ (Huckabee, 2017), while on Facebook one post stated, ‘A woman’s place is

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anywhere but piloting the TARDIS’ (‘Doctor Who Should be Male’, 2019). In fact, due to a number (though unspecified) of direct complaints made to the BBC, unusually, they released a statement on the issue. Since the first Doctor regenerated back in 1966, the concept of the Doctor as a constantly evolving being has been central to the programme. The continual input of fresh ideas and new voices across the cast and the writing and production teams has been key to the longevity of the series. The Doctor is an alien from the planet Gallifrey and it has been established in the show that Time Lords can switch gender … We hope viewers will enjoy what we have in store for the continuation of the story (BBC, 2018a).

When the premiere eventually came in October, it proved a success and was, in fact, the highest series opener since the show’s return in 2005 (Goldbart, 2018), and although viewer numbers dropped by the end of the series, it was still regularly featuring in the top ten of UK programmes, and it delivered US audiences too. The critics were mostly convinced, with The Guardian newspaper describing Whittaker’s performance as ‘effervescent’ (Martin, 2018) and The Hollywood Reporter opting for ‘fizzily captivating’ as well as ‘loose and lively, cheeky and irreverent’ (Bahr, 2018). Some fans remained unhappy, however, with some feeling she was ‘too passive’ (‘This is not my Doctor’, 2018) and others that she was ‘a kinder, gentler, touchy-feely, kid-friendly Doctor. She is full of self-doubt, is indecisive and wants a hug’ (Belam & Martin, 2018). All of which is perhaps just code for ‘the Doctor is a woman’. Always an important moment for establishing the character of any new Doctor, Whittaker’s costume consequently had a lot of extra work to do. As had been the case with previous incarnations, the costume was revealed in advance, in this case a full year before the series aired. It featured a long pale blue hooded coat, trimmed with rainbows, cropped trousers with sensible boots, a dark T-shirt also with a rainbow stripe across the chest and yellow braces. Jodie Whittaker and the costume designer Ray Holman developed the look together. Whittaker said, ‘I found an old black-and-white image on Google that spoke to me. It’s of a woman walking with purpose in crop trousers, boots, braces and a T-shirt, and she just looks so comfortable and non-gender specific – that was my style point’ (Radio Times, 2018). Although gender neutrality was the aim, the designer Holman did make the point that ‘Jodie’s Doctor’s costume has around 6 pockets but I may have forgotten one. Pockets are important not only for this character but for women in clothes in general because for so long in history women didn’t have pockets and even today some women’s trousers suits are still made without them’ (BBC, 2018b).

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This ‘non gender specific’ approach was in marked contrast to the earlier representation of the Master, the Doctor’s great enemy, also a regenerating Time Lord. In Series 8, the Master is revealed to be Missy (Michelle Gomez). Of course, if the character had been called the Mistress (as a feminized version of the Master) this would rather have given the game away to alert audiences, but Missy means ‘a young girl’ and is often used in a disparaging way, as opposed to the more mature ‘mistress’, which usually means a woman in a position of authority. In her regeneration and renaming, the female Master seemed to have some of her power removed. Missy also embraced a hyper-feminine appearance, wearing period Victoriana, complete with corset and bustle. As the central character, the hero, the new Doctor apparently could not afford to do the same. (See Figure 1 where the Doctor is not afraid to get stuck into some ‘hands-on’ engineering under the TARDIS.) The Doctor’s costume, despite everything, managed the show’s usual neat trick of introducing a fresh look whilst winking towards previous incarnations. An analysis of the pre-2005 version of the show noted that in spite of ‘the superficial differences between them, there was a much greater underlying continuity in the costumes worn by the [at that point] eight successive lead players than is generally acknowledged’ (Britton & Barker, 2003, p. 146). They pointed out that the Doctor’s clothes always seem to owe something to the fin de siècle (Victorian/ Edwardian era) and to ‘professional authority or the upper class’ (Britton & Barker, 2003, p. 147). However, there was always something ‘not quite right’, out of context or exaggerated in its execution. The Fourth Doctor (Tom Baker) wore

Figure 1  The first female Doctor Who (Jodie Whittaker) is not afraid to get stuck into some ‘hands-on’ engineering work. Doctor Who, Spyfall (12.1).

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a scarf that was too long; the Fifth Doctor (Peter Davison) wore a strange version of cricketing whites; the Eleventh Doctor, the youngest, wore a tweed jacket and bow tie reminiscent of an early-twentieth-century professor, but also often wore a Fez – a type of flat-topped red hat made popular in the turn-of-the-century Ottoman Empire. The Doctor does not get it right because of course the Doctor is an alien. Whittaker’s outfit is one of the most contemporary, no tweed or velvet on display, or leather patches on the elbow, but the silhouette of the long coat (reminiscent of the frock coat), trousers and boots was familiar and easily, with the possible exception of the Twelfth Doctor’s black suit, white shirt and Dr Martens boots, the least eccentric of the Doctor’s outfits. The eccentricity, the ‘getting it wrong’, rather lay in a woman wearing sensible boots instead of high heels, practical trousers instead of a skirt, and a coat with pockets instead of a handbag. In this context, the Thirteenth Doctor’s costume is less eccentric and instead quietly radical. The refresh, however, as Chibnall had intimated, extended to more than just the costume. The storylines of Series 11 were more contained than had been the case in prior series, with a greater focus on self-contained individual episodes and a return to the ‘history lessons’ of the original concept, with episodes such as Rosa (11.3) exploring Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott in 1950s Alabama, or Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror (12.4) introducing the maverick engineer with a fascination for electricity. The Witchfinders (11.8) also referenced a historical moment, set around the Pendle witch trial in Lancashire, one of the most famous in English history. The Doctor too seemed to have left behind the edgier, alien, moments of previous Doctors. She seemed to have cheered up, with a revitalized zeal, as she herself announced to ‘sort out fair play throughout the universe’ (11.1). The famous sonic screwdriver, a tool for every occasion that the Doctor always carried, was shown being built by the Doctor herself. This Doctor was not the pitiless punisher of The Family of Blood (3.9) where the Tenth Doctor ensured eternal prisons for each of the aliens; or being responsible for the death of a companion, like the Twelfth Doctor who lost two companions Clara Oswald (Jenna Coleman) and Bill Potts (Pearl Mackie). However Fugitive of the Judoon (12.5) introduced a forgotten incarnation of the Doctor (Jo Martin) with a violent streak and an audacious retcon in The Timeless Children (12.10) brought the Doctor’s origins into question and opened up a narrative thread about her true identity both of which were followed up in Series 13.

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Cult TV Heroines

The furore surrounding the Thirteenth Doctor prompts a question: why does this matter? The age and provenance of this most quintessential of Cult TV shows seem to make a female Doctor Who a very big deal, but why does it matter what sex an alien, fantasy, imaginary character appears to be? But Doctor Who illustrates well the tension that runs through most of this book between ‘what is’ and ‘what may be’ which lies at the heart of fantasy. Stories certainly help to shape expectations and illustrate social realities, but they also provide a playground for ideas and imaginative possibilities. Despite two hundred years (give or take) of feminism, there is still work to be done in imagining all that women might be capable of. As stories begin to be told and retold, with innovations and unexpected twists and turns, the full range of possibilities for women become more thinkable and conceivable. These ‘fantastic’ tales may be constrained by production context and ideological norms, but they also have the power to spark imaginations and suggest new directions. The Thirteenth Doctor is a big deal. In this book, I will textually analyse some of the stories that have been told in the fantasy genres of the imagination where we might expect to see the most radical visions of what women might be and achieve, but I will also examine, more often than I would like, where they fall short and where gender norms still constrain the heroines. But, whatever else Cult TV might be, the attachment of audiences to the texts suggests that they are telling stories audiences are hungry to hear over and over again. The sheer volume of material generated by television is one of the biggest challenges in studying any aspect of television. The number of hours involved and the length of the narrative in any drama series are off the scale in comparison to studying film, thus arriving at a representative but manageable number of shows for this book has been challenging. The programmes that have been selected are a cross section, rather than an exhaustive list, but I am well aware of the debates that rage amongst fans and academia regarding what is and what is not Cult TV: even the most casual conversation with family and friends revealed that everyone has an opinion! Therefore, the aim for each chapter has been to take two or three programmes as the focus of discussion, with at least one from the ‘back catalogue’, alongside more contemporary offerings, which does sometimes throw up surprising results where the older shows seem able to imagine freer heroines than the contemporary ones. However, the book is not just about Cult TV but also about heroines, and in order to facilitate that discussion one of the conditions I set in choosing programmes was that the heroine must be at the centre of the show. I have

Prelude: The Thirteenth Doctor

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looked for protagonists with agency, where the narrative thrust of the show centres their journey. Thus, I have left out many secondary female characters in dramas where a male is obviously the central concern of the story. For example, Farscape (1999–2003, Jim Henson Productions) has many interesting female characters: the tough Aeyrn (Claudia Black), the philosophical plant priestess Zhaan (Virginia Hey), the teenage delinquent Chiana (Gigi Edgley) and others, but there can be no doubt that the narrative revolves around Crichton (Ben Browder), the human astronaut who is trying to find his way home. The exception to this rule is Chapter 2 which focuses on male/female partnerships, included here as the original entry point for heroines in Cult TV before they became standalone protagonists in their own right. Chapter 1 covers the essential but complex question: what is Cult TV? Cult TV is perhaps best described as a composite creation of sometimes competing cultural forces where the texts hold some of these forces in tension, which goes some way to accounting for their sometimes messy, rambling and disjointed narrative worlds. The composite is broken down into three sections. Firstly, the external environment, considering external production and distribution settings in the world of television broadcasting, which both creates and sustains the shows in question, and sometimes destroys them too. The second element in the composite is the text itself. This section explores the knotty question of genre, particularly around fantasy, takes an overview of academic approaches to the phenomenon, before tackling the third element the internal environment, suggesting why Cult TV exists at all, through the introduction of concepts of active imagination and the transcendent function drawn from Jungian psychology. The chapter concludes by circling back round the question of the external environment, albeit this time from an ideological point of view, encompassing feminism, gender and autonomy. Subsequent chapters focus on the Cult TV texts themselves. The approach has been to consider a blend of narrative and audiovisual textual analysis. First of all, the ‘type’ of character is introduced with some history and context before moving on to a closer look at each show in turn, keeping a dual focus on the presentation of the heroine within the audiovisual text, with particular emphasis on mise en scène, as well as the various punishments and rewards of the narrative, before finishing with some points on fan activity. In this way, although the emphasis is on the text itself, the relationship between external environment and audience can also be kept in view. The focus remains on the text itself however, rather than on fan activity with the text.

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Chapter 2 begins with the series of male/female partnerships in The Avengers (ITV, 1961–9), 1980s curio Sapphire & Steel (ITV, 1979–82) and the hugely successful The X-Files (Fox, 1993–2002, 2016–18). The relationship power dynamics at the heart of the drama will be explored alongside the mysterious forces that ultimately appear to control the unconventional couples. Witches are at the heart of the next chapter, a folklore figure of terror, seemingly drawn from the mists of time, but as this chapter exploring US 1960s sitcom Bewitched (ABC, 1964–72), Charmed (The WB, 1998–2006), American Horror Story: Coven (FX, 2013) and the Netflix hit Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (Netflix, 2020–ongoing) makes clear, the witch in these stories is a twentieth-century invention. Chapter 4 takes us to the most numerous of the Cult TV heroines – the warrior. This chapter explores heroines for whom violence is a particular attribute, focusing on Wonder Woman (ABC/CBS 1975–79), Xena: Warrior Princess (Renaissance Pictures, 1995–2001), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (20th Century Fox, 1997–2003) and Wynonna Earp (Syfy, 2016–2021). Chapter 5 examines the strangest and most unstable iteration of Cult TV heroines, those who are evolving, represented by a collection of hybrids – the cyborg Jaime Somers in The Bionic Woman (NBC, 1976–8), the genetic experiments Max in Dark Angel (Fox, 2000–2) and Jessica Jones (Netflix, 2015–19). The final chapter surveys the issues for female leaders, with particular focus on Star Trek Voyager (CBS, 1995–2001) and Star Trek Discovery (CBS All Access, 2017–ongoing). Audiences might engage with Cult TV for all sorts of reasons, but the focus of this book is on the female characters, past and present. In these shows we can see a kind of history of women and feminism, a clear development of their roles and capabilities, although not inevitably becoming more progressive with time. However, because the stories are fantasy, speculative, imaginative, attempting to envision, re-envision what women (and men) might be like, we can also see that some developments, prefigured in the imaginative realm, then become possible within material reality. Perhaps it is time for another leap of imagination to take our heroines to fresh territory. It had been the plan to include Doctor Who through the long line of the Doctor’s companions, but then the Doctor herself underwent that significant regeneration. Things can change.

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The Cult TV composite

Cult TV is a media and cultural phenomenon which appears in the mid to late twentieth century and refers to a broad range of television programmes that audiences relate to in particularly passionate ways. As the title suggests, this book is a broadly gendered approach to Cult TV and as such the obvious place to start is with the twin questions of genre and of heroines: what is Cult TV and how does it depict its female characters? However, many books on Cult TV begin with an account of the diversity of programmes that could come under such consideration. Gwenllian-Jones and Pearson (2004) note discussions about the inclusion of The Simpsons and the World Federation Wrestling at the start of their book. David Lavery likewise begins The Essential Cult TV Reader (2010) with an account of a disagreement over whether Gray’s Anatomy (ABC, 2005–ongoing) should be included (Lavery, 2010, p. 2), despite being a medical precinct drama in a realist style. The term Cult TV has ranged through sf, horror, fantasy, children’s television, nostalgia texts and beyond, remaining an alarmingly expansive term. The programmes under discussion in this book are not so variegated. They are all drama and all fall towards the fantasy end of Cult TV. In choosing to focus on the fantasy end of the spectrum, I do not mean to suggest that other types of programme are not ‘cult’, but rather that when looking at the role of women in such dramas, the combination of ‘what is’ and ‘what may be’ is highlighted in illuminating ways within fantasy shows. However, in accepting a narrowing of the type of programme under discussion, questions about the nature of genre itself and its place for both industry and audiences are raised. Cult TV is not a traditional genre. It is a complex amalgam of activities, effects and affects. It is a mosaic; a molecule rather than an atom; a composite cultural construction: all of which goes some way to explaining why it is so difficult to conclusively define. However, the first chapter of this book will try to sketch out the fuzzy boundaries of this composite phenomenon through a three-part approach.

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Firstly, the ‘external environment’ is explored: the role of technology, the importance of the audience and finally the response of the industry to the business potential of the phenomenon. These interactions have acted as a kind of virtuous cycle for the television industry which at least partly explains Cult TV’s subsequent shift from niche to mainstream. The second part of the composite is the text itself. Although the role of audiences in Cult TV has become the dominant debate in academic circles, I will argue that the text itself has a key role to play. It is a liminal space, or it creates a liminal space, for the audience to indulge in its imaginative, creative, ludic activities. Here we will tackle the question of genre and fantasy, and the role of imagination. Drawing attention to the liminality of the text which demonstrates its action in linking the external environment of production context, with the internal environment, the final element of the composite. The ‘internal environment’ denotes a psychological element which has been partially explored using Freudian/Lacanian approaches or Winnicott’s concept of transitional objects, but I will be referring to Jung’s model of the psyche with its view of the unconscious as an active agent, and the related concepts of the transcendent function and active imagination. This tripartite model of Cult TV allows for a fuller explanation of the psychological attraction of the phenomenon than has been attempted before. There is a sticky, permeable boundary between the viewer and the text, or perhaps a liminal space made of viewer and the text, that warrants further investigation, but in choosing to focus on the heroines of the dramas, in this book the text will remain the primary site of investigation.

The external environment: Business, technology and audiences The first focus of the Cult TV composite is the external environment to understand how and why programmes come to be made and how they are consumed. Public service broadcasting notwithstanding, television is primarily a business with the aim of making programmes that audiences want to watch in order to attract advertisers. Technological changes affect both audience consumption practices and business strategies, and for Cult TV this led to a virtuous cycle. Technology has long been a driver of change in the television industry forcing adaptation of business models as producers go in search of audiences. These shifts have come to be characterized as TV I, TV II, TV III and

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perhaps now TV IV. This terminology was originally coined by TV industry magazine editor Steve Behrens in 1986, who used the term TV I to refer to the era of network dominance in US television, roughly 1948–75, and TV II as the post-network era when other forms of broadcasting, such as satellite or cable, became more available. In 1996, Reeves, Rodgers and Epstein began discussing further technological change in television exploring the effect of The X-Files (Fox, 1993–2018) on US television, revisiting their definitions in 2002. They proposed the term TV III to cover a post-1995 era of growing digital broadcasting with even more channel availability placing ever greater emphasis on brand identity. In 2018 Dunleavy reworked some of their points to include the term ‘multiplatform’ and the growth of nonlinear broadcasting and streaming services, but Jenner (2018) made the case for streaming services led by Netflix constituting a further major shift in the industry, justifying its categorization as TV IV. Cult TV dramas such as Star Trek have often been at the forefront of such changes. Video was another disruptor, which became available to the general consumer from the early 1970s with Sony’s Video Cassette Recorder (VCR). Audiences could now purchase their favourite programmes and watch them as often as they wished, whenever they wished. Control was shifting towards the audience, but there was an even more disruptive technology emerging in the late 1990s: the internet. However, this was not just another means of ever-faster content delivery to the audience, the rise of what was dubbed by DiNucci in 1999 as Web 2.0 marked a transition from essentially static web pages to an ever greater emphasis on user-generated content and social media tools. This gave everyone (with enough economic capital and education) the ability to publish directly to the web. It became easier and easier for Cult TV fans to find each other, to chat online and share not only reviews but other kinds of creative work, creating along the way communities of taste, explored at length by Henry Jenkins in 2006, 2013 and 2016. We will come back to Jenkins’s important contribution to the Cult TV debate in due course. These were all changes key to the development of Cult TV audiences. It was a dramatic shift from scarcity, controlled by the television channels, to an abundance of always-available content largely controlled by the audience, a trend that has only intensified with the growth in subscription services such as Netflix. So over the second half of the twentieth century and into the twentyfirst, technology had revolutionized the availability of television content, leading to changes in the habits of audiences who now take scheduling into their own hands. The role of Cult TV in this landscape has been of increasing business importance with its ability to aggregate what had been relatively niche

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audiences dispersed in space and time. Cult TV texts also fostered intense fan engagement that lasted, meaning that ‘cult’ has been shifting from the margins to the mainstream for some time. MIPCOM, an annual conference of major international industry content providers and distributors, noted in 2018 that 29 per cent of all Netflix Originals that year were science fiction or fantasy as these were the most preferred genres amongst Netflix subscribers (McLaughlin, 2018). As we can see, it is difficult to discuss one aspect of the Cult TV composite alone: technology and audiences are intimately intertwined, for as technology granted audiences more control over what they could watch and when, their choices began to affect commissioning decisions. The term audience ‘refers simply to the act of viewing, reading, or listening to media texts’ (Casey et al., 2008, p. 22), and whilst of course, audiences are essential to any form of television, for Cult TV they have become central to understanding the phenomenon. ‘Cult’ comes from the Latin word cultus meaning ‘worship’ as in a religious cult, so a cult audience is one which demonstrates fervent devotion to their show. This term was used in the early days of academic interest in Cult TV, to emphasize the idea that what Cult TV audiences were doing was a niche activity and not mainstream audience behaviour. Cult TV audiences, it was argued, were different. They were worshippers of the programme – ‘fan’, being an abbreviated version of ‘fanatic’ which Jenkins traced back again to the Latin word fanaticus, which originally meant ‘a temple servant, a devotee’ (Jenkins, 2013, p. 12) which of course circles back round to the meaning of the word ‘cult’. Cult TV fans watched their shows with great attention, but they also did things with it. Trekkers and Whovians showed their devotion in a number of ways: an encyclopaedic knowledge of the storylines, episodes and characters, as well as cast and crew, including special effects, and writers; writing songs; writing and re-writing stories for characters; art work of all kinds; and more complex pursuits such as learning the Klingon language. In the days before the internet, knowledge of this kind of behaviour had a limited circulation through fan clubs, newsletters, fanzines and conventions, but after the internet the reach grew exponentially and the sharing tools of Web 2.0 made it far easier for fans to connect with each other. There have been many studies of the Cult TV audience in the age of Web 2.0, tracing their activity at various levels as they work (or perhaps play) harder than a typical mainstream audience at collaborating with the text in order to create meaning, seeming to delight in decoding the narratives, sometimes playfully and idiosyncratically. Most books exploring the phenomenon of Cult TV included at least some material on the activity of fans, but Bacon-Smith

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(1992) was an early look at Star Trek fandom, while Jenkins & Tulloch (1995) studied the audiences of Doctor Who and Star Trek. More recently the academic conversation has opened out to include fandom in many guises – see Gray, Harrington and Sandvoss (2017) and Booth (2018). There has been a significant shift in the Academy away from the analysis of texts, towards investigating what audiences are doing with texts (of all kinds, from film to music to gaming). So technological changes in the latter part of the twentieth century meant several things to the audiences of Cult TV shows. Firstly, they were able to watch their favourite shows without having to rely on the vagaries of TV scheduling via linear broadcasting, initially through video and DVD distribution, then through other online routes. Secondly, as personal computers became more affordable and connection to the internet faster, they were able to interact with their favourite shows more directly sometimes writing their own stories, sometimes working with images from the show as stills and sometimes even re-editing their favourite scenes in a variety of different ways. This had the effect of allowing audiences to engage even more deeply with the programmes and then share the results with other fans. The growing availability of the internet and its increasing speed, and the rise of Web 2.0, meant that the opportunities to share this creative and imaginative passionate engagement with other fans have grown. There are for example many easy hosting options for websites developed and maintained by fans, such as http://fandom.wikia.com, a wiki site which runs its own contributor programme, where the reward for writing articles is not wages, but ‘swag’ as they put it, but what amounts to special access to industry events and conventions. The growth in fan activity has also meant that although earlier Cult TV was often relatively low budget, production money has followed the audience and many of the shows mentioned in this book are big budget, quality productions. As Johnson (2005) has convincingly argued, the place of Cult TV in contemporary scheduling was no sudden aberration but a logical development of trends in American television, while Abbott (2010) pointed out that there had been a blurring of lines between what had been thought of as Cult TV and what had been thought of as quality drama. Globally the smaller cult audiences are aggregated through subscription video on demand services, and with the growth of binge watching and long form drama, a ‘cult’ audience has become more valuable than ever. However, technology and production priorities alone do not account for the special relationship between audience and Cult TV text. Having established the external environment that encouraged Cult TV to flourish, we must now turn our attention to the second element of the Cult TV

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composite: the text itself, the touch point between the external environment of industry and the internal environment of the audiences’ psyches. Although the focus of media studies has certainly shifted towards fandom, the text remains the catalyst, the filling in the sandwich, the agent provocateur even, for all the activity which takes place with it and around it.

The text: Genre, fantasy and liminal space Inevitably, any discussion circling around Cult TV texts has to pass through the question of genre. What type of text is under discussion? Is Cult TV a genre? It is a reasonable question. If we can identify a group of texts that seem to have something in common, and there is a label for such texts, then we ought to be able to define them as a genre, but this question is asked of Cult TV over and over again without easy answer. Defining boundaries, outlining stylistic hallmarks, or repertoires of elements and narrative structures in anything like a concise way becomes very quickly difficult and leads to the conclusion that perhaps it is not a genre, after all, at least not in any traditional sense. To paraphrase the point Buscombe made about Hollywood Westerns back in 1970 – if we want to know what Cult TV is we must look at certain types of programmes, but how do we know which programmes to look at until we know what Cult TV is? This section will explore some of the issues around genre, look more closely at the question of the fantasy genre and then conclude with a discussion of the particular question of ‘style’ in Cult TV. At its most basic, genre is a kind of taxonomy, a scientific term for classifying animals and plants, for example, based on their shared characteristics. At its core, genre is simply a way of classifying objects based on their similarity and difference to other objects. However, the association with scientific principles can be misleading because it assumes that these ‘classifications are like standards: formalised, durable rules’ (Frow, 2015, pp. 56–7), but problems emerge when attempting to find such durable rules for cultural objects because boundaries in culture tend towards fuzziness rather than clarity. Within literature the attempt to classify output has a long history, though it is one of many stops and starts. One writer suggests that genre theory ‘possesses one of the oldest pedigrees in the history of Western, Eurocentric literary and cultural criticism’ (Caraher in Strong & Stevenson, 2006, p. 29), a pedigree which confidently and regularly stakes a claim to its origins in Ancient Greece, so often seen as the foundation of western culture. This claim for the longevity

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of genre’s history typically references Plato’s Republic (circa 373 BCE) and Aristotle’s Poetics (circa 330 BCE) as the origins of the concept. In the Poetics, as well as outlining ideas on narrative structure, Aristotle put the poetry of his day into types: Epic (or narrative) poetry such as The Illiad; Tragedy; Comedy; Dithyrambic poetry for the God Dionysus and Satyr (or fertility) plays. Besides narrative, Aristotle also discussed plot, character and the style of writing as well as melody and music, in fact giving us many categories that we might still use today in discussing genre. However, this version of the history of genre is rather misleading, as it seems to suggest a continuity and evolution of the term that is not there. Altman calls it a ‘zig zag trajectory’ (Altman, 1999, p. 1), because after Aristotle, the idea of ‘genre’ as a way of discussing literature dropped out of sight until the Poetics was translated from Greek into Latin by William of Moerbeke in 1278 some 1,600 years later! Even then, the Poetics was virtually ignored for another 500 years and it was not until the sixteenth century that Italian scholars began to re-examine Aristotle’s treatise (see Javitch, 2000). Along with much else during the Renaissance, an ‘origins story’ looking back to Ancient Greece was projected onto the history of genre. There was another problem. In reality, the sixteenth-century revival was a combination of Aristotle plus the Roman poet Horace, whose Ars Poetica, written in 19–18 BCE, was an extension of Aristotle but it had been written with quite a different aim in mind. Rather than describing the different types of poetry that already existed, Horace laid out rules to which the poet should adhere, thus establishing a prescriptive rather than descriptive approach to genre. In fact, such ‘rules for creating poetry’ were the norm until the Romantic movement in literature towards the end of the eighteenth century. The Romantics sought to break free from such edicts and create poetry which was more emotionally authentic. However, even this did not entirely break down the rules-based approach to literature, which lasted into the twentieth century. Finally, in 1902 a direct theoretical attack on this way of thinking was launched by Benedetto Croce who sought to liberate art from the ‘dogmatic restraints which the standards of the classical “literary genres” had imposed’ (Moss, 1990, p. 17) suggesting that genre was only useful for arranging books on shelves. Theories of genre, he argued, ‘impoverish artistic creation and criticism alike, inhibiting originality, setting up erroneous standards of judgement, and belying the tendency of true art to break rules and violate norms’ (Duff, 2000, p. 25). This is a point of view that resurfaced in the mid part of the twentieth century when film theorists began to pit the ‘genre director’ against the auteur.

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Given the earlier discussion about the audience in Cult TV, it is noticeable that genre theory, whether descriptive or prescriptive, paid no attention to the audience: literary critics were not very interested in readers. However, as genre theory was more fully debated within the film academy, several things began to happen. The idea that genre could be a blueprint for production success was allied to a view that it could also be a marketing label for distributors and audiences. Thus genre became a tag that, in most senses, was defined by the film industry but understood by the film going public. Whilst this did at least open the door to including the audience, it also assumed that they were told what genre was. Within television studies, genre was seen in a similar way to film, primarily as a marketing tool, working within schedules to craft audience expectations of television’s continuous flow of programmes. However, things began to change with Fiske’s Television Culture, originally published in 1987. He made clear that television was a highly generic medium, but described a triangular relationship between producer, text and audience, paying particular attention to audience practices around television. In 2004, Mittell focused once more on the question of genre and television, arguing that whilst genre is best understood as a process of categorization, ‘it is not found within media texts, but operates across the cultural realms of media industries, audiences, policy, critics, and historical contexts’ (Mittell, 2004, p. xii), thus placing the emphasis on production and audience, rather than on the nature of the text itself. So in television and film studies there has been slippage from consideration of textual hallmarks as a descriptive way of defining genre towards audience activity. This certainly appears to be more helpful when trying to grapple with the variety of programmes which have been associated with active audiences and fandoms which have particularly passionate engagement with their object of devotion, but fandom per se can take us a long way from Cult TV towards anything from sport to comedy to music. There must be something about a Cult TV text that encourages an audience to behave in this way. The association of ‘cult’ and media objects has its origins in a foundational essay by Umberto Eco entitled ‘Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage’ first published in 1985, but originally delivered as a conference paper in 1984. It is an important essay, but it is short and evocative rather than definitive. In it, Eco briefly and tantalizingly discusses a number of characteristics which make a film into a cult object, before going on to discuss his particular example, Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942). The elements Eco discusses are worth reiterating: the object must be loved; it must provide a completely furnished world; it must display ‘organic

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imperfections’, being ‘wobbly and disjointed’ and even ‘gloriously incoherent’; it must be capable of ‘unhinging’, of being ‘dismembered into a series of excerpts’ or ‘visionary icebergs’; it must be an example of ‘living textuality’, that is quoting other stories rather than real life (which is what he calls ‘intertextual frames’); and finally he identifies elements that have a particular fascination, an additional ‘magic flavour’ that he terms ‘intertextual archetypes’, though he is swift to disassociate this from any psychoanalytic tradition. We will come back to this last point with regard to the ‘internal environment’ of the Cult TV composite in due course. These were an evocative series of propositions which focused not just on the characteristics of the text itself but included audience behaviour around their ‘cult object’ and, as noted above, the academy has by and large followed up on these suggestions particularly with regard to Cult TV. However, the essay does not cover the full range of questions around Cult TV as he ignored ‘the mechanisms (non-theatrical distribution, independent film and television exhibitors) that rendered Casablanca cult’ (Gwenllian-Jones & Pearson, 2004, p. x). In other words what the audience was doing was important, but Eco had not considered the external environment in which business decisions (films remaining in repertory theatres) allowed the audience continued access to the film text in the first place. As a semiotician, Eco was mostly interested in the text itself, and vaguely in the audience, but not in the industry and business surrounding both. Then, in 1992, Henry Jenkins published what has been called a ‘transformative work’ (Jenkins, 2013, p. vii), Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture, which sought, inspired by John Fiske’s concept of ‘audience practices’, to offer a more detailed ethnographic account of what a particular group of fans was doing. Jenkins opened his chapter on the text with a quote from Eco, but on the whole he focused on fan culture from an explicitly anthropological and sociological perspective looking at the fans’ mode of reception; their viewer activism; the formation of interpretive communities and their production of texts, assuming a kind of oppositional stance in his concept of ‘textual poaching’ meaning the fans were making use of texts that did not belong to them. It also established the idea of the academic who is also a fan, adopting from anthropology concerns about the supposed objectivity of the observer. In 1993, Cult TV – the Essential Critical Guide, by Lewis and Stempel, took up the baton. Although it was more of a journalistic compendium of Cult TV shows, it contained a discussion about how such shows could be defined, though they were rather contradictory. They too restated Eco’s idea (without reference) that

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Cult TV programmes were ‘objects of special devotion’; that merchandizing and fan clubs were crucial; the text must include something unusual, adventurous and preferably kitsch (1993, p. 8) and only succeeded after a troubled start with audiences slow to catch on. These are ideas that still regularly resurface in Cult TV discussions. In Fan Cultures (2002) however, Hills circled around the issue of fans and the text once again though preferring to utilize the idea of ‘family resemblances’ rather than genre per se. The family traits included ‘auteurism’ associated with the concept of ‘quality’ television and the high art it implied, thus giving due recognition to creative individuals, despite television’s largely collective production practices; ‘perpetuated hermeneutic’ or endlessly deferred narrative organized around a central enigma (where the audience must keep interpreting a central question such as who exactly is Doctor Who?); and hyperdiegesis which Hills describes as ‘the creation of a vast and detailed narrative space, only a fraction of which is ever directly seen or encountered within the text but which nevertheless appears to operate according to principles of internal logic and extension’ (2002, p. 137), another way perhaps of referring to Eco’s ‘completely furnished world’ of ‘wobbly and disjointed’ nature. Hills also made an attempt to fill in the missing question of why audiences behave in the way they do through Winnicott’s notion of the ‘transitional object’ which will be returned to in the following section. Gwenllian-Jones and Pearson’s 2004 important edited collection Cult Television begins with a brief discussion of Eco but made a pitch for the ‘full circuit of communication’ (2004, p. x) to be taken into consideration. They considered Cult TV to be texts which demonstrate narrative elasticity and textual density encouraged by what they called seriality (but which we might now call ‘long form’); production/distribution which saw the value in creative high-budget, quality television which combined a number of niche groups to provide a sizeable audience with a high proportion of avid fans; and audiences’ intense interpretive practices. They pointed out that fans have an ‘imaginative engagement’ with their chosen shows, but they also included in quite a long list of issues the question ‘why do text producing fan cultures accrue to some series but not to others?’ (2004, p. x). This was a crucial question which was not answered. In 2005, Catherine Johnson’s Telefantasy focused on the predominance of fantasy within the Cult TV frame and developed the idea of ‘telefantasy’ drawn from fandom (and reiterating the importance of fan culture in bestowing the title of ‘cult’ upon a show) but concentrated upon the industry production

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context, within which she included ‘textual strategies’ as an implementation of production strategies. The years 2010 and 2011 saw a number of books published on Cult TV which had, by that point, to recognize that the phenomenon had shifted from being of only niche interest to being of mainstream corporate interest, even though the industry by and large was not using the term Cult TV but rather ‘High Concept’ or ‘Quality’ or simply sf and fantasy. The virtuous cycle of the external environment was pushing Cult TV shows to the fore. Stacey Abbott noted in the introduction to The Cult TV Book (2010) that intense fan practices had moved from the fringes to the mainstream, and fan conventions were now a crucial market for the networks and studios. She also argued for a shift away from telefantasy to include all TV genres and discussed the further blurring of lines between Quality TV and cult; how marginal and niche styles, narratives and themes had redefined TV conventions, and the industry’s shift to actively fostering fan engagement, perhaps because some of Cult TV’s fans were now working in the industry. David Lavery (2010) reiterated many of the arguments around Cult TV with, once again, particular emphasis on the role of the audience in conveying that cult status, though the book was another compendium of essays on various Cult TV shows, while making the point that Cult TV had by this stage become quite ‘self conscious’ about itself (Lavery, 2010, p. 3). Sue Short’s Cult Telefantasy (2011) focused on Johnson’s definition of telefantasy and offered analysis and case studies of a range of cult telefantasy texts, though she did not explore the idea of fantasy any further than Johnson, but confirmed again that cult did not necessarily mean niche any longer, as ‘the broadcasting industry has proved adept at commodifying cult interest’ (Short, 2011, p. 2). She went on to point out that not ‘all telefantasy shows manage to elicit “cult” interest. Some arrive too soon to find a receptive audience, some are cancelled early, and some simply have something missing’ (2011, p. 6), an interesting throwback to Eco’s point about ‘magic flavour’ and Gwenllian-Jones and Pearson’s important question about why some texts attract audience activity and others do not. The problem is that Cult TV is not a genre, at least not in a traditional structuralist sense where one can draw up a list of underlying qualities within the text that will be common to all members of such a set. The concept of genre does not work here either in Aristotle’s descriptive sense where a repertoire of elements can be broken down and listed, or in Horace’s prescriptive sense as a set of rules that can be used to manufacture a text as much as corporate producers might like to achieve such a thing. Instead the audience or, to be more specific, highly engaged active fans are the hallmark of a Cult TV text. It is not just a

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question of quantity (a big audience), but of quality, intensity and activity. A Cult TV fan does more than just watch the show when it is on. A Cult TV fan actively seeks out the text, studies it, questions it and plays with it creatively, incorporating it into their lives. The arguments about the range of cultural practices that Cult TV fans engage are on-going, but there is a particular subset (genre) of television drama that seems to be particularly prevalent in these discussions. Fantasy seems to have the capacity to provide space for that textually dense, narratively elastic hyperdiegesis and perpetuated hermeneutic that Eco and Hills described, and any compendium of Cult TV always contains a high proportion of fantasyrelated material. Not coincidentally, many of the difficulties of assigning genre to Cult TV are replicated and even intensified by a closer look at the idea of fantasy itself, which has not, with the exception of Todorov’s 1973 work The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, been examined very closely within the Cult TV debate. Even Johnson’s book Telefantasy, though noting that fantasy is a ‘generically unstable category’ (2005, p. 3) with subversive potential, does not explore a definition of fantasy very deeply, choosing instead to use the term ‘telefantasy’. A closer look at the term fantasy in the context of genre, however, demonstrates some intriguing parallels with the phenomenon of Cult TV and explains the choice to focus on fantasy texts within this book. Both fantasy and Cult TV have tested the academic application of genre which has struggled to encompass the range of works that have fallen under their aegis. Looking to the Ancient Classical period as we did over the initial question of genre, Jackson (1993), for example, begins her discussion of fantasy with consideration of the menippea, a brand of satire named for Menippus of Gadara from the third century BCE which ‘broke the demands of historical realism or probability. The menippea moved easily in space between this world, an underworld, and an upper world. It conflated past, present and future, and allowed dialogues with the dead’ (Jackson, 1993, p. 14). This was not a retelling of mythology or a form of religious writing; rather, it was what Bahktin called a genre of ‘ultimate questions’ (Bakhtin, 1973, p. 95). There is a problem however with looking for origins in this way, because as Mendlesohn & James (2012) point out, there are many texts that read as fantasy to a contemporary audience, but may have originated from the minds of people whose ideas about the location of the boundary between ‘real’ and ‘fantastical’ were different. Clute (1992) chooses to call the such writing ‘taproot texts’ implying they should be seen as source material for later works, rather than fantasy per se. John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s

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Progress (1678) is one such example, often mentioned in histories of fantasy, but was originally intended as an instructional religious allegory. Most critical histories of fantasy, however, assign an ‘originary’ moment for fantasy to the eighteenth century, which helps to differentiate ‘modern’ fantasy from those ‘tap root texts’. Mathews argues that fantasy begins to emerge in the 1600s during the end of the Renaissance and the start of the Scientific revolution. ‘Until the scientific method began to tame and frame the world’, he suggested, ‘the human imagination had had free rein to explain mundane reality by referring to supernatural forces (Mathews, 2002, p. 2). Sandner (2004) however suggested a slightly later historical moment for the development of fantasy by drawing on the influential work of literary critic M. H. Abrams. In The Mirror and the Lamp (1953) Abrams argued that with the Romantics, literature shifted from being a mirror held up to the external world towards an ‘inward directed lamp’ shining a light on an interior (subjective) world of the self. It was, in fact, a shift in attitude towards imagination itself and the role of the artist or poet. For the Romantics, imagination was now beginning to be thought of as an interior faculty of the mind and as such allowed for a wildness of creativity set apart from the realities of the external world. It was something the Romantic poets sought to engage in their writing, rather than working rationally within the prescriptive literary genre rules of their day. So, in the historical approach to fantasy, a clear connection is established with the beginnings of the modern era where the establishment of a fantastic literature lay alongside the rise of the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution and in time the Industrial Revolution and the growth of the realist novel. Writing about a ‘real world’ that was being gradually uncovered by the logic and rationality of the scientific method was at the same moment being subverted by new forms of creativity and imagination, even if works about ‘reality’ were considered more favourably by critics. The reasons for this negative assessment of works of imagination and fantasy can (once more) be traced back to Aristotle and Plato. They had made the assumption that the purpose of art in all its guises was mimetic, which was rarely questioned. Mimesis comes from the Greek meaning ‘to imitate’, so from this point of view the purpose of art is to imitate life. ‘It is an astonishing tribute to the eloquence and rigor of Plato and Aristotle as originators of western critical theory’, pointed out Hume, ‘that most subsequent critics have assumed mimetic representation to be the essential relationship between text and the real world’ (Hume, 2014, p. 5). She went on to point out that ‘to many thinkers, fantasy has seemed a silly self-indulgence, even a perversion’ (Hume, 2014, p. xvi). To simplify

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the perspective, an artistic vision tied to reality was seen as valuable, whilst an artistic vision set loose from such bounds was seen as questionable at best. However, fantasy and reality have a strange but umbilical relationship with one another. Jackson’s (1984/93) important book on fantasy notes that the etymology of the word ‘fantastic’ (from the Greek meaning imagination or appearance) ‘points to an essential ambiguity: it is un-real. Like the ghost which is neither dead nor alive, the fantastic is a spectral presence, suspended between being and nothingness. It takes the real and breaks it’ (Jackson, 1993, p. 20). Quite a striking point, but we can see even here that there is a difficulty in talking about fantasy without also bringing in thoughts on Reality or Realism as well, an issue that Hume tackled head on in her book Fantasy and Mimesis (1984/2014). She suggested that Aristotle and Plato’s basic assumption about literature itself must be reconsidered, that the impulse behind literature is mimesis and therefore that fantasy is peripheral and separate. Instead, Hume proposed that literature as a whole should be seen as the product of two connected impulses: mimesis – a desire to imitate with such verisimilitude that others can share that relationship – and fantasy – the desire to change givens and alter reality (Hume, 2014, p. 20). Literary genres of all types are thus formed of a characteristic blend of these two impulses in a ‘more or less’ relationship rather than as a binary opposite. This is different to the historical approach to fantasy, which recognizes the two poles of mimesis and fantasy in literature as being related to wider historical developments but continues to see them as ‘dialectical poles’ (Mathews, 2002, p. 3) rather than accepting that both are present within any given text: fantasy exists in a direct relationship with reality and reality exists in a direct relation with fantasy. Any act of imagination, any fiction, requires at least some invocation of fantasy, and however realistic, the most realist novel is still a construction and not reality itself. In literature (and all forms of art) fantasy and mimesis depend upon one another to demonstrate their meaning and the history of Western literature is a dance between these two impulses. This is a helpful way of approaching the difficulties of genre identification and Cult TV. Those dramas with contain Eco’s ‘magic flavour’ have a tendency to sit across the intersection of fantasy and mimesis (or representation of reality). They might lean towards Abrams’s interior world, but they also keep a foot in the everyday. They play with conventions and expectations. Fantasy creates truly liminal texts, sitting across a variety of thresholds; imitating life and yet invoking something other; showing what is possible and what is not; sometimes using the conscious and rational to describe or give form to what is unconscious and irrational. The

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fantasy texts of Cult TV create these liminal spaces and invite their audiences into play, and the success of the narrative elasticity and textual density that GwenllianJones and Pearson (2004) described lies in the way these texts create ludic space for the audience. As such, as I will argue below, they also create space to dialogue with the unconscious. This is the ‘magic flavour’ that Eco refers to. Before going on to further explore the ‘internal environment’ or ‘inner world of the imagination’ as Abrams put it, I would like to circle round the question of mimesis once more, but with particular reference to the style of ‘Realism’ which has particular resonance to debates within film and television theory. Realism has been of great concern in the academy, whilst fantasy has been seriously under-theorized by comparison. Perhaps the question of ‘style’ in the audiovisual text will allow us to pick out where the debate may have gone. Realism, it is commonly assumed, has some kind of relationship with ‘reality’. As Morris points out, ‘The term realism almost always involves both claims about the nature of reality and an evaluative attitude towards it. It is thus a term that is frequently invoked in making fundamental ethical and political claims or priorities, based upon perceptions of what is “true” or “real”’ (Morris, 2003, p. 2). So something which is presented in a realistic (mimetic) way is taken to be more truthful. Real is so often taken as another way of saying ‘true’ and thus it contains a whole host of ideological assumptions. However, within the arts, including television drama, realism is not documentary, but rather a style of representation, associated with certain aesthetic conventions. So ‘realism’ in an audiovisual text would be better termed ‘mimesis’, to keep in clear view that is a form of representation and not reality itself. The development of the cinematic arts, first photography and then moving images, seemed to offer a new way of capturing the world in the kind of detail that artists of previous centuries could only dream: compared to a painting, or a novel, what could be more ‘real’ than a photograph, and with the addition of movement and then sound, film was surely the most mimetic of all the arts. Given the underlying assumptions put in place by Aristotle and Plato that the fundamental purpose of art is to be mimetic, it is hardly surprising that in its struggle to be taken seriously as an art form, cinema embraced ‘realism’. Relatively quickly, certain technical conventions developed within the audiovisual system, which were designed to persuade the audience to suspend their disbelief and see the film and television screen as a kind of ‘window on the world’. For example, film could indeed record and reveal physical reality, but the role of editing in shaping that proved an early bone of contention for

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theorists. Film critic André Bazin championed the use of deep focus in the 1950s, where all planes within the view of the camera lens are in focus along with long takes (a scene with no edits) as more ‘natural’ techniques, which allowed the camera to record time as well as space. By way of contrast, heavy editing, particularly montage as described by the Soviet film maker and theorist Sergei Eisenstein, chopped film up into small fragments which Bazin considered an intrusive interruption of the ‘natural’ continuity of duration. However, even if Bazin’s argument were to be accepted, it does not take account of the way the camera can move while shooting a scene, nor its framing or its angle, which necessarily offers a specific vantage point (of all the vantage points possible) and thus offers a ‘point of view’ and an interpretation of the image being recorded. In 1970, Baudry noted that ‘from the moment the camera intervenes, a form of manipulation begins’ (quoted in Lapsley & Westlake, 2006, p. 158) showing that film appeared to take ‘what would seem like instants of time or slices from “reality” (but always a reality already worked upon, elaborated, selected’ (Baudry, 1974, p. 42). In 1972, Peter Wollen summed up what he called the seven deadly sins of Hollywood and concluded that ‘cinema cannot show the truth, or reveal it, because the truth is not out there in the real world waiting to be photographed’ (Wollen in Rosen, 1986, p. 129). Nonetheless, mainstream film developed a number of codes and conventions that created ‘reality effects’. Camera and editing have already been mentioned, but the classical Hollywood style which developed between the 1930s and 1960s can be simply summed up as a desire to convey narrative clearly. This was achieved through a number of codes and conventions: matching mise en scène, a sound mix which favoured the voice and smoothed over editing cuts, a camera which followed the action in a close syntax of shots (long shot or establishing shot first, before moving to medium shots and then close ups, whilst observing eye line matching), extensive use of continuity editing, and the shot/reverse shot pattern. Far from being a faithful, mimetic depiction of reality, Realism shows itself to be neither a window onto reality nor a mirror held up to nature, but rather a set of aesthetic conventions, but even so the Hollywood style, or the Classic Realist Text as it sometimes called in television, still encourages its audiences to accept this as ‘realistic’. Understanding the mainstream mode of audiovisual texts and its use of ‘realism’ as a construct and a style raises interesting questions about the style of Cult TV and fantasy. Whilst the narratives of Cult TV shows are often large and rambling, creating the ‘fully furnished world’ that Eco described, or the perpetuated hermeneutic and hyperdiegesis that Hills suggests, the narratives

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themselves tend to stick to fairly predictable patterns. Though offering moments or even episodes of disruption, they are often fairly straightforward and do not in themselves often undermine the ‘reality effect’. However, the complexity of signification (meaning making) within even rigorously controlled audiovisual texts is of bewildering order, made up of many multimodal elements. Every utterance by every character in every scene is accompanied by a wealth of visual or aural subtext which may qualify, undercut or strengthen the statement, which is more heightened than the routine contextualization that occurs in real life (gesture, expression, intonation, dress, etc.) because the mainstream mode of drama tends to heighten and thrust a preferred meaning at the audience by demanding that the viewer look or listen at particular elements through the use of closeups or the manipulation of the soundtrack. So just as it is possible to see the tension between fantasy and mimesis at work within literary texts, there is also tension within audiovisual texts, between the organizing narrative forces of the Classical Hollywood style and the visual complexities of mise en scène, sound textures, and the speed and rhythm of camera work and editing. It is a kaleidoscope of signification where chains of meaning and association can emerge but the mixture of complexity and organization makes the audiovisual text particularly prone to slippages. The term used to denote such slippage is ‘cinematic excess’ (see Bordwell in Rosen, 1986) where the text exceeds the bounds of what is necessary to the narrative, or more concisely put a ‘style that exceeds meaning’ (Galt, 2011, p. 143). The classical Hollywood style made a virtue of a strict formal organization subordinated to the narrative, but even so, it still contains excess meaning. This is because the cinematic text is really a ‘braid of codes’ (Linderman in Rosen, 1986, p. 143) which has been burnished to disguise its ‘segmentary modality and make it appear natural, endowed with mimetic truth and narrative fluency’ (Linderman in Rosen, 1986, p. 142), but a braid it remains where the relationship and tensions between the twin impulses towards ‘realism’ or ‘mimesis’ and ‘fantasy’ are clear to see. Mise en scène is evocative and dense, and of particular interest with regard to Cult TV where fantasy calls for exaggerated styles. As Britton and Barker have pointed out, visual dramas are ‘unstable, capricious, mobile spectacle’ (Britton & Barker, 2003, p. 207) where the meanings of design imagery are many, some even ‘fugitive or indefinable’ (Britton & Barker, 2003, p. 11). Of course, design supports the integrity of plot and character but it also has the ability ‘to generate constellations of associative thoughts in the mind of the spectator, spinning ideas around the linear trajectory of the narrative’ (Britton & Barker, 2003, p. 17), suggesting far more than is directly relevant to the writer’s or director’s

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purpose. Design, we might therefore say, is the source of much of the ‘excess’ of the dramatic text and where much fantasy may reside. Thus, as in literary fiction, realism and fantasy in film and television are representational modes that re-present reality to the audience and are not ‘reality’ itself: an image of the thing is not the thing. However realism as a style tends to stick with general notions of what is possible and socially accepted, whereas fantasy begins to show the impossible. This is particularly worth paying attention to within Cult TV because narratives at the fantasy end of the spectrum often trade heavily on the complexity and detail of their mise en scène and the sheer exuberance of their design can disrupt the coherence of the otherwise mainstream text where style ceases ‘to reassure the legibility of the image and invite speculation’ (Branigan & Buckland, 2015, p. 181). So the rich and detailed mise en scène taken along with narratives that open up imaginative possibility create rich seams of ambiguity for audiences to mine. Cult TV, especially in the fantasy mode, is an excessive text whose complex braids of signification overflow the limits of the narrative (however rambling) in ways that encourage the audience to expand the diegetic world with their own creations. Thus the excess of the compositional modality, a text’s formal strategies of content, colour, spatial organization and so on, works with, but also beyond, the limits of the narrative, and Cult TV heroines are positioned first within the narrative but also within the excess stylization of the text, which can at times contradict or subvert the overt message of the drama. A liminal Cult TV text is fuzzy, sticky, permeable. It grades off in a variety of directions; it contains gaps and misrecognitions that audiences play with, respond to, rewrite as their own psychological mood takes them. It partakes of something of realism and the conscious world of rationality, and it is affected by the external environment of technology and production practice, and yet it also evokes magic and fantasy and the unconscious worlds of imagination where anything might be possible. It is to this inner world that we now turn as we cross the threshold into the ‘internal environment’.

The internal environment: Analytical psychology As has been argued, Cult TV is a composite phenomenon whose growth can be attributed to technical changes that saw growing availability of audiovisual texts which had previously been rationed by networks. Fans could now more

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readily get their hands upon their programmes, and set to work interacting with them in ways the industry had never foreseen. The text, with its ‘completely furnished worlds’ but ‘wobbly and disjointed nature’, leaves a liminal and ludic space where the audience can play, sometimes very intensely, suggesting that the text sparks a special kind of psychological engagement. Cult TV audiences are lively, excited and emotional about their texts, but their activity goes beyond simple enjoyment of a good story, or even discussion about plot twists and characters. Cult TV audiences want to inhabit their texts in a way that even ardent fans of other kinds of drama do not. They creatively interpret stories in a great many ways, sometimes going beyond any kind of logical sense: making costumes and dressing up for cosplay, becoming fluent in invented languages, writing, drawing, re-enacting, singing, knitting and stitching (see Cherry, 2016), but within the academy the ‘internal environment’ of Cult TV that gives rise to such activity has been much less well explored. Eco spoke of the ‘particular fascination’ and ‘magic flavour’ that lead the devotees to worship their ‘cult object’, whilst Sandner, discussing fantasy, noted that the ‘fantastic opens spaces of interpretation’ (Sandner, 2004, p. 1). In tackling Cult TV, Gwenllian-Jones and Pearson invoked the ‘imaginative involvement’ and ‘imaginative engagement’ of the audience with the Cult TV text, but none offered an explanation of why such a thing might be happening. Others have attempted to engage with psychological explanations, mostly drawing upon the psychoanalytic perspective that has tended to dominate media studies and cultural theory more generally, with Jackson for instance suggesting that fantasy ‘deals so blatantly and repeatedly with unconscious material that it seems rather absurd to try and understand it without some reference to psychoanalysis’ (Jackson, 1993, p. 6). Within Cult TV debates, however, the question of ‘why’ has not been tackled nearly so often as the question ‘what’ in terms of fan activity. Matt Hill’s Fan Cultures (2002) is a rare exception, making use of Winnicott’s concept of the transitional object as an explanation for fan involvement. The academic discussion around literary fantasy, however, has been less reticent in exploring this territory and writers have been well aware of the ways in which fantasy seems to engage with unconscious material. Within studies of the fantasy genre, Jackson’s psychoanalytic work has been influential, but others, however, such as Hume (2014), Manlove (1983) and Attebery (1992) instead introduced concepts arising from analytical psychology, that is, theory drawn from Carl Jung’s work, rather than that of Sigmund Freud, with Attebery even suggesting that while Freud was good for analysing horror, Jung was better when it came to fantasy. This was because whilst Freud focuses on early childhood

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development, Jung’s theory described a lifelong process of growth and development. Sandner also suggested that Jung can be helpful in understanding the purpose or uses of fantasy, saying, Freud’s new focus on the unconscious has an obvious importance for criticism of the fantastic generally, although his onetime follower C G Jung’s notion of the archetypes emerging from the unconscious has arguably been more directly important to helping fantasists and critics talk about the sometimes strangely flat but powerfully evocative characters appearing in genre fantasy as derived from heroic romances, epics, fairy tales, and, ultimately, myth (Sandner, 2004, p. 74).

Fowkes’s (2010) examination of fantasy film traces out some of these connections more fully, exploring how myth, fairy tale and other ‘taproot texts’, and fantasy have begun seeing them as resonating with the psyche, especially the unconscious and thus fulfilling certain psychological functions. For example, Joseph Campbell’s ‘monomyth’ laid out in 1949’s Hero with a Thousand Faces outlines a ‘coming to adulthood’ narrative as told across many cultures and across many centuries and appears to explain why such ancient stories still have resonance for audiences today. Cult TV texts, with their gaps and their uncertainties, flirt with fantasy worlds in the borderlands between the conscious and the unconscious realms of the psyche, creating a liminal space where the deep affective engagement of the audience points towards a ‘coming together’ of conscious and unconscious for the audience, a terrain that Jung saw as a fertile place for exploration and self-knowledge. Generally speaking, Jungian ideas have been much less represented within the Academy than Freudian or post-Freudian ideas. This is for several reasons. It is well known that Freud and Jung were keen to work together in the early days of their acquaintance; however, in 1913 the two men fell out leaving the field split between those who favoured Freud’s ideas and those who favoured Jung’s. This matter might have remained within the field of psychology, but was exacerbated during the 1960s by the rise of the French journal Tel Quel (meaning ‘such as it is’). Between 1960 and 1982 Tel Quel published a mix of theory, creative writing and radical critique, developing along the way a method of textual analysis that became dominant within the Academy. The journal’s list of contributing authors reads as an impressive ‘who’s who’ of influential critical theorists including Lacan, Derrida and Kristeva, amongst others. Tel Quel attempted to import the codes and rhetoric of hard science into the language of literary criticism where there was ‘an aspiration for the theory of literature to

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attain some of the logical hardness and rigour of mathematics’ (ffrench, 2015, p. 108). Their approach blended semiotics, Marxism and psychoanalysis as a kind of total theory for understanding any kind of cultural ‘text’, which in time included film and television. These approaches were indeed a powerful combination of theory, but its influence became almost hegemonic within cultural studies and it is worth mentioning here because the brand of psychoanalysis adopted and developed by the Tel Quel group came through Jacques Lacan, himself something of an enfant terrible within the psychoanalytic school, but who was not interested in Jung (although it seems the two men met in 1955 (Kirsch, 2000, p. 158)). Tel Quel itself was rather more vitriolic in its distaste for Jungian ideas, with one article in 1979 suggesting that Jung’s reading of the novelist Joyce was a Nazi one (Houdebine, 1979). More usually Jung was painted as a mystic lacking in that ‘logical hardness and rigour of mathematics’ sought by the journal’s authors (see Miller (2018) for a more detailed discussion on this issue). Jung’s ideas centred around several key points that differed from both Freud and Lacan. First of all Jung saw the unconscious as an active participant in the psyche, rather than simply a repository of repressed contents. Jung did not dispute the existence of repressed contents, but instead saw these as belonging to a personal unconscious. For Jung there was another layer, a region of the psyche from which the possibility of consciousness arose, the psychic process which led to ego formation and self awareness, a process ruled by patterns of psychic energy which he eventually called archetypes. These archetypes could never be conscious, but their existence could be discerned in archetypal images which appear in personal dreams and images, as well as works of art and culture more generally. So the collective unconscious was a complex biological system from which consciousness arose as a property of those systems, and as such, the unconscious remained an active participant in a person’s psyche, whose totality included both the conscious and the unconscious. The psyche, for Jung, was thus a potentially self-balancing system which could and must change across a person’s whole life and where, as a consequence, subjectivity is flexible, adaptive and seeking balance. So for Jung, the unconscious, if given some conscious attention, could assist in achieving a healthy psyche, one flexible and capable of adaptation throughout life. This is different from the psycho-analytic account of consciousness which consisted of the one traumatic Oedipal moment (Freud) or Mirror Phase (Lacan), where ego formation in a child is created by a split from the m/other at the point of language acquisition, a moment which forever severed the subject from their unconscious but which left a lingering sense of

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nostalgia for a barely remembered time of unity. The psychoanalytic subject is one forever damaged by the gaining of consciousness. Archetypes have often been the headline of Jungian theory, most succinctly described by Jung as ‘an inherited organisation of psychic energy’ (Jung, 1971, p. 447) or ‘a condensation of the living process’ (Jung, 1971, p. 445) which can never be apprehended by the conscious mind directly. Jung warned that we must ‘constantly bear in mind that what we mean by “archetype” is in itself irrepresentable’ (Jung, 1960, p. 214) which is ‘never conscious and never will be’ (Jung, 1968, p. 156). The archetype an sich belongs to the unrepresentable collective unconscious, but its ‘effects … make visualisations of it possible, namely the archetypal images’ (Jung, 1960, p. 214). The ego, the most conscious part of the psyche, was described by Jung as ‘a relatively constant personification of the unconscious itself ’ (Jung, 1963, p. 107) and which Jungian therapist Berry has called simply ‘a sense of continuity’ (Berry, 1974, p. 69). The ego is important, but it is only one part of a dynamic system, which is in constant dialogue with the unconscious and subjectivity itself is only ever a temporary stabilization. There has been a long debate around the exact nature of archetypes and archetypal images but in 2004 Samuels suggested that the way to identify an archetypal image is through an ‘intensity of affective response’ (Samuels, 2004, p. xiv), certainly an evocative phrase within the context of Cult TV texts and their audiences. It is fascinating that despite Eco’s swift move to distance his invocation of the term ‘archetype’ from any psychoanalytic connotation, his description of the ‘intertextual archetype’ phenomenon would not be out of place of in a postJungian description of an archetypal image. Eco says he intends the term only to indicate a pre-established and frequently re-appearing narrative situation that is cited or in some way recycled by innumerable other texts, and provokes in the addressee a sort of intense emotion accompanied by the vague feeling of a déjà vu that everybody yearns to see again. I would not say that an intertextual archetype is necessarily ‘universal’. It can belong to a rather recent textual tradition (Eco, 1985, p. 5).

Fascination, intense emotion, sense of recognition and a desire to engage with the text are all part of what post-Jungians would recognize as an archetypal image’s ‘magic flavour’, while more recent consideration of the cultural dimension of any single specific conscious iteration of an archetypal image would perhaps have served to allay his concern about the lack of ‘universality’. However, rather than continuing to discuss specific archetypes, of more interest for the debate around Cult TV is the psychological mechanism that allows the unconscious and conscious to communicate: something Jung called

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the transcendent function. For Jungians, the ‘intensity of affective response’ may indicate that the transcendent function has been activated, and it is this aspect of Jungian theory that can be used to further explore the phenomenon of Cult TV and the reasons why some series attract imaginative engagement from the fans and some do not. Jung saw the unconscious as an active participant in the psyche and that psychological health was reached by paying attention to both the conscious and the unconscious. Because of this ‘active participation’ he thought that images from the unconscious contained teleological purpose in leading the selfbalancing psyche towards health. However much of the history of humanity, he thought, had been aimed at developing the capacity of the conscious to handle logical thought although at the cost of the ability to listen to the unconscious, leading towards one-sidedness. As he said: ‘The definiteness and directedness of the conscious mind are extremely important acquisitions which humanity has bought at a very heavy sacrifice, and which in turn have rendered humanity the highest service. Without them science, technology, and civilisation would be impossible’ (Jung, 1960, pp. 69–70). However, one-sidedness, he went on, ‘is an unavoidable and necessary characteristic of the directed process, for direction implies one-sidedness. It is an advantage and a drawback at the same time. Even when no outwardly visible drawback seems to be present, there is always an equally pronounced counter-position in the unconscious’ (Jung, 1960, p. 71). The psyche, however, retains the capacity to mediate between what Jung called directed and non-directed thinking, which he associated with the conscious and the unconscious. The transcendent function then ‘mediates opposites. Expressing itself by way of the symbol, it facilitates a transition from one psychological attitude or condition to another’ (Samuels, Shorter & Plaut, 1991, p. 150). In fact, the transcendent function is the key mechanism of the self-regulating psyche, a way of facilitating a shift in consciousness. Jung called it ‘transcendent’ not in a spiritual sense, but in the sense of transcending two opposites, in this case conscious and unconscious, through symbolic images which contain both. So, the transcendent function is a core process of the self-balancing psyche, a way to mediate opposites and facilitate a transition from one psychological attitude to another. This function is the bridge which ‘involves a dialogue between consciousness and the unconscious through the instrumentalities of fantasy and symbol’ (Miller, 2004, pp. 54–5). Already we can see the relevance for the fantasy genre and Cult TV as a cultural space for such symbols to circulate.

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It is interesting therefore to find Jungian ideas cropping up in discussions about fantasy and the imagination. For example, Hume and Manlove make use of Jung’s ideas about archetypal images within culture to explore the content of fantasy literature, and as noted this has always been Jung’s headline theoretical idea. Although consideration of archetypal images in Cult TV is certainly appealing, the transcendent function offers a broader understanding of the psychological process which may be activated by the television texts. Jungians perhaps take fantasy more seriously than other psychological schools because it is not seen as a regression towards childish modes of thought. It is ‘more than a whimsical landscape of imagination and imagery, [where] Jung conceived of fantasy as that terrain of the psyche where the shackles of preconceived limits could be discarded and psyche could actually transform itself ’ (Miller, 2004, p. 42). So fantasy is an important personal and cultural space, where real and imaginary, the possible and the impossible, mingle and interweave bridging the gap between conscious and unconscious modes of thought, and appears spontaneously in personal dreams and visions, as well as cultural and creative works designed to be collectively consumed. The transcendent function brings the internal psyche into relation with the external environment, allowing an individual to work through conflicts. So, for Jung, ‘fantasy was not an abstract concept but a psychic reality’ (Miller, 2004, p. 42) and a vital component for psychic health. The transcendent function then allows dialogue between two modes of being, often through the formation of symbols, which Jung thought of as themselves holding opposites in tension (a foot in each camp of conscious and unconscious). As he put it, ‘The confrontation of the two positions generates a tension charged with energy and creates a living third thing – not a logical stillbirth … but a movement out of the suspension between opposites, a living birth that leads to a new level of being, a new situation. The transcendent function manifests itself as a quality of conjoined opposites’ (Jung, 1960, p. 90). Jung’s method was based on ‘evaluating the symbol (i.e. dream image or fantasy) not semiotically, as a sign for elementary instinctual processes, but symbolically in the true sense, the word “symbol” being taken to mean the best possible expression for a complex fact not yet clearly apprehended by consciousness’ (Jung, 1960, p. 75). In this context, imagination, symbols, fantasy are seen as sites where such vital psychic activity can take place, and far from being childish or trivial, fantasy is an essential tool for psychological health and the transcendent function is a natural function of the psyche to enable self-regulation.

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Hume (2014) argued that mimesis and fantasy should be given equal billing and that all texts must partake of both to a greater or lesser degree, but if we recharacterize these as aspects of conscious consensual reality and unconscious personal psychic reality, we see the fantasy genre in all its manifestations is a site of activity where the transcendent function is in process. In this context, the variety and complexity of the material under discussion are no longer an issue. The fantasy genre is one of the few cultural sites in contemporary Western society where symbols arise spontaneously, where they can be played with, where dialogue with otherness takes place, where unconscious contents can be displayed, taken seriously and listened to as an equal. From this point of view the answer to the malleable and protean nature of the fantasy genre and Cult TV lies explicitly in its role expressing or activating the transcendent function. Fantasy is the cultural space where contents from the unconscious can be explored, which makes Cult TV a contemporary manifestation of fantasy where the transcendent function is animated for its fans. Although any creative product generated for public consumption has been ‘worked upon’ to some extent at least by a conscious will, and so must operate within the constraints of dominant ideologies, at the same time screen fantasy still flirts with enough unconscious content to allow dialogue with symbols of potential transformation and trigger the transcendent function. The activity of the audience in taking up images, characters and narratives and playing with them on their own terms suggests that they do retain or develop some fantasy/ symbolic ‘savour’ or Eco’s ‘magic flavour’ for the audience. The audience is key to identifying Cult TV because any programme which activates the transcendent function will encourage the audience to play with the text for their own ends. The ‘intensity of affective response’ triggered for audiences offers dialogue with unconscious contents and the possibility of a transformational moment via the symbols of the text. Whilst dreams might be considered the most direct apprehension of the unconscious that any individual might have, Jung thought that dreams themselves were quite hard to deal with as they are so difficult to understand, but he also allowed for more conscious engagement with fantasy material through a therapeutic process he called ‘active imagination’. He suggested that ‘spontaneous fantasies’ are ‘more composed and coherent’ than dreams and contain much that is ‘obviously significant’ (Jung, 1960, p. 78). This is not conscious creation, but a spontaneous fantasy, or dreaming with open eyes which could be encouraged by exercises eliminating critical attention or by becoming as conscious as possible of the mood one is in. It can also be approached, he thought, not intellectually,

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but creatively by giving it a visible shape through painting or drawing, sculpture and even physically through bodily movements, although it is important to remember that the art form is not itself active imagination: though it does reflect it, it is the experience of the person creating it rather than the medium that is active imagination (Schaverien, 2005, p. 128). In this context, it is helpful to avoid thinking of consciousness and unconsciousness as binary opposites or an on/off switch, and instead to think of it as a gradient where psychological experiences can be ‘more or less’ conscious or unconscious. We have all experienced the slide into sleep which is a process rather than an abrupt instantaneous transition, although we are only aware of it if the process is interrupted. The aim of active imagination as a practice is to ‘hold opposites in tension’; to ‘sit with’; to ponder analogies; to make ample, to explore, to peer between the cracks, examine instabilities and contradictions, in order to glimpse the workings of a psyche which, as noted earlier, includes the active unconscious as realm of the psyche as important as the more focused ego. Through this process of active imagination Jung saw the unconscious being brought into a more tangible form that could be apprehended by the conscious mind. The drama that manifests from the spontaneous fantasy appears to ‘want to compel the viewer’s participation. A new situation is created in which unconscious contents are exposed to the waking state’ (Jung, 1963, p. 547). Where Jungian clinicians are dealing with images from clients, academics are dealing with images from culture, but both are attending to affect, compensation and teleology. The text of Cult TV activates the ‘transcendent function’ within the audience by presenting symbolic images which bridge conscious and unconscious realms. It is a form of collective active imagining, a relationship between audience and text (though also an increasing back and forth between producers and consumers). Although the previous section made use of the idea of liminality, a word indicating a threshold of some kind, this concept has also been used within Jungian film theory. Izod and Dovalis (2015), for example, have explored the idea of cinema (and by extension television) as a ‘liminal space’ drawing on an earlier definition of the term as ‘a cultural-psychological interstitial field that predominates during periods of change in an individual’s life cycle. It links the old and the new fixed identities between which the person is in transit’ (Stein, 1980, p. 63). Although it can be argued that television viewing happens in less rarefied conditions than cinema, often in the midst of domestic life, it is also true to say that most Cult TV fans watch their shows avidly in the style of cinema. There is an alchemy in the relationship between the Cult TV audience and their

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chosen text, one demonstrated in the intensity of their ‘affective response’ and their subsequent activities with and around the text, because this liminality is not just the interface between audience and the screen, it is also at the interface (the intersection) between the individual’s conscious and unconscious. We can see within the fans’ activity with the texts that active imagination mobilizes the psyche as Cult TV audiences have a uniquely passionate relationship with their chosen texts – firstly, viewing avidly and repeatedly their favourite episodes and moments, but then engaging in their myriad creative activities in order to remain within the terrain of the imagination for longer. Sometimes what they are looking for (what I would call ‘psychological savour’ rather than Eco’s ‘magic flavour’) is not quite strong enough, and fans rewrite the texts to make it more discernible. The fan fiction practice of ‘shipping’1 can be seen as a form of amplification, where usually, in Jungian practice, personal material is ‘made ample’ through consideration of mythological material. However, ‘restatement’ is another method of amplification, a way of ‘staying with’, of making louder and larger the elements within the text that have activated the transcendent function. It is a form of active imagination that focuses in on the unconscious element and tries to make it more accessible to consciousness. As Jungian therapist Berry said, by ‘restatement I mean a metaphorical nuance, echoing or reflecting the text beyond its literal statement’ (Berry, 1974, p. 73), which in a therapeutic context might be done in two ways – firstly by replacing the actual words with synonyms and equivalents and secondly by restating the same words but paying closer attention to the metaphorical quality within the words themselves. In fan culture, fans might rewrite or restate texts in any number of ways: actual writing as in fan fiction which takes the characters and scenarios of the show but writes new plots or changes the dynamics of character relationships; it might be a reworking of the actual audiovisual text itself in montage sequences with music for additional affective emphasis; or cosplay and other immersive activities. This seems an instinctive activity which highlights the elements of the text that are most important to the individual fan, even if they are not (in fact) there in the original, an occurrence particularly prominent in shipping and slash fiction – see for example the romantic pairing of Seven of Nine and Janeway in Star Trek: Voyager (see Bowring, 2004) or Xena and Gabrielle in Xena: Warrior Princess (see Hanmer, 2014). By proposing that certain audiovisual texts can evoke the transcendent function for the audience and trigger practices of active imagination, the supposed ‘cult’ element of the phenomenon begins to make more sense. The

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affect-laden responses evident in the passionate fandom and their avid viewing as well as their repetition of the text in viewings and memory; the immersion in cosplay; and the elaboration or restatement of the texts through fanfic, editing and so on are all aspects of the audiences engaging in the practice of active imagination to dialogue with their unconscious for the purpose of psychic balance. It also explains why, it has to be said, that for others, these texts have no psychological resonance whatsoever. The liminality of the Cult TV text is a threefold one, but rather than see it as a series of thresholds, it is more useful to conceptualize it as a living tree, where its leaves, trunk and roots connect the external environment of production and business to the audience, but deeply to the audience, to their interior psyche and unconscious, in a mutually dependent and evolving ecosystem. This book has chosen to keep the focus on the text itself, rather than on specific fan activities, though there is clearly much more exploration of that territory to be done, perhaps examining the moments when fans move from obsessive creativity to more detached enjoyment, or even disinterest, suggesting that the transcendent function via the symbols of the text has done its work. Instead, the analysis of individual shows aims to explore the qualities of the texts themselves which open up imagination and creativity for the audience, whether through large rambling narrative worlds or through the excessiveness of the mise en scène, whilst keeping a close eye on what is happening to the heroines at the centre of the stories, the figure we will turn to now.

Heroines and autonomy Although making use of the psychological concept of the transcendent function through fantasy is central to understanding the Cult TV phenomenon, it does not mean that all issues relating to consensual social reality are shelved, indeed, far from it because this book is not looking at all Cult TV or even all fantasy Cult TV. It has a much narrower focus upon heroines and with this comes the question of gender, which, at least to some extent, takes us out from the internal psychic world and towards external consensual reality once more. Gender was a term co-opted by second wave feminists in the early 1970s, during a period of consciousness raising inspired by the American civil rights movement. Women had begun to challenge assumptions about female social roles and responsibilities, recognizing that the legal rights won in earlier generations (such as the right to vote) had not transformed the inequalities that

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existed between men and women. In 1972, sociologist Ann Oakley published a book which took the term ‘gender’ which had been in use only in medical circles and reworked it for more political purposes. The opening sentence of the chapter entitled ‘Sex and Gender’ is admirably clear: ‘“Sex” is a biological term: “gender” a psychological and cultural one’ (Oakley, 2016, p. 115). She went on ‘to be a man or a woman … is as much a function of dress, gesture, occupation, social network and personality, as it is of possessing a particular set of genitals’ (Oakley, 2016, p. 115). By 1975 Gayle Rubin had developed the critique further insisting that gender was a form of oppression and ‘a socially imposed division of the sexes’ (Rubin, 1975, p. 179). Feminists were working to denaturalize the idea of what men and women were by decoupling social norms (gender) from physical biology (sex), because while biology could not be changed, social assumptions certainly could. First impressions might encourage feminist celebration of the number of heroines within fantasy and Cult TV who seem to be quite distinct from the heroines of previous eras. Silent-era heroines, for example, so often seemed to stand in need of rescue by a hero, disastrously prone to twisting an ankle and falling into the wrong hands. A big budget example might be Way Down East (DW Griffiths,1920), starring Lilian Gish as the tragically wronged Anna, left fainting on an ice floe, drifting towards a water fall and certain doom, only to be rescued at the last minute by the stalwart David (Richard Barthelmess). However, it is a mistake to make blanket assumptions about ‘progress’, because in the ‘throwaway’ and popular silent cinema serials of the 1910s such as The Perils of Pauline (20 episodes), The Exploits of Elaine (14 episodes) or The Hazards of Helen (119 episodes), we see a different kind of heroine. So often regarded as exemplars of the ‘damsel in distress’ genre, with their absurd plots and persistent jeopardy, they also offered the audience (fantastical?) visions of athletic, risktaking, exuberant young women, searching for justice, making their way in a man’s world, or demanding adventure before accepting marriage, which is what gets Pauline into so many perils (see Singer, 1999). In The Wild Engine, Episode 26 of The Hazards of Helen, the indefatigable Helen (Helen Holmes) jumps on a motorbike to chase down an out-of-control locomotive, jumps off a bridge into a river, swims to the shore and runs out in front of the train to save the day, even if she is presented with the bill for the motorbike at the end of the film. Stigmatized as ‘low brow’ but nonetheless hugely popular, we can see more than a passing family resemblance to the Cult TV heroines of later-twentieth-century television. Perhaps in more ways that one as the genre also coupled ‘an ideology of female power with an equally vivid exposition of female defencelessness and weakness’

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(Singer, 1999, p. 184) because Serial Queens were also tied up, kidnapped and generally menaced on a regular basis, again like Cult TV heroines. In choosing to look at fantasy Cult TV texts featuring heroines, this book is examining the ways in which their female protagonists have been presented through character, narrative and the audiovisual elements of the text. The analyses of the individual shows explore the idea that the fantasy nature of the text allows scope for more imaginative presentations of feminine gender identity than traditional kinds of drama, and that audiences are drawn to the ‘psychological savour’ that such figures present to them. However, as will become clear, the fantasy texts are not always as imaginative or inventive as might be supposed, and like the Serial Queens of the 1910s, there are mixed messages for our Cult TV heroines. It is not a simple case of either ‘empowered and active’ or ‘threatened and passive’. However, this merely reiterates once more the paradox at the heart of fantasy: the tension between fantasy and mimesis. If fantasy works around the limits of what can be known, within the cracks, the shadows, the twilight, the basements and back alleys of culture, between the conscious and the unconscious, it is, at the same time, not a-cultural. Fantasy and consensual reality co-exist within every text, and in most Cult TV texts fantasy is constrained to one or two possibilities – that magic exists, or that demons and slayers exist – but most other elements of the milieu tend to remain untouched: people eat, people sleep, gravity works more or less, sometimes there is still school to go to or livings to be earned. The umbilical relationship between consensual reality and fantasy remains, and one danger of invoking a psychological approach, as Fowkes has pointed out, is that it risks ‘naturalising aspects of psychology and society that are at least partly cultural and historical’ (Fowkes, 2010, p. 49). It is an issue that postJungian theorists have also been addressing. Whilst Jung once described myth as a ‘textbook of archetypes’, where the unconscious psyche ‘is not rationally elucidated and explained, but simply represented like a picture or a story book (Jung, 1988, p. 24), post-Jungians recognise that these stories are not created ‘in an historical and cultural vacuum but rather as they are culturally elaborated and expressed in terms of the world view of a particular age and culture’ (Walker, 2002, p. 4). Context is important, and the fantasy Cult TV heroines in this book are still constrained by dominant ideas about gender. Each analysis stays alert to the ways in which consensus reality often remains uncontested and unremarked within the text. Many of the shows discussed here make an effort, sometimes a lot of effort, to present their heroines differently. They are more active, they are more central

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and in many cases do have more agency than the many heroines of the past. They do not (very often) twist their ankles or require rescuing. However there are still stereotypes being played out, and there is still an underlying ideology of patriarchy to contend with. For example, their appearance in all cases provides no resistance to the slim, able-bodied, conventionally pretty standards of mainstream Hollywood. The mise en scène of costume and make-up, even figure expression and movement, often tells a significantly different story to the words the protagonist might be saying out loud. The presence of figure-revealing outfits, high heels, perfect hair and make-up speaks against the agency and power of the heroine, or at least puts certain limits upon it. To fight in high heels, for example, suggests an unrealizable vision of how to be a physically powerful woman. The ‘happily ever after’ for the heroines is still so often finding the right man as a romantic partner, even if it is not always actual marriage. And they still struggle to act autonomously, or with agency, without being punished for it. Establishing whether the Cult TV heroines have agency is a key question in establishing the progressive credentials of these characters. At its simplest, agency denotes ‘the ability of individuals to have some kind of transforming effect or impact on the world’ (Mcnay, 2016, p. 39) while autonomy is ‘an individual’s capacity for self determination, or self governance’ (Dryden, no date.) These terms sound straightforward but, of course, contain a number of assumptions that benefit from closer attention. Like so many other concepts, it arises originally from the Ancient Greek idea or philosophical goal of ‘self mastery’, where the most important trait was rationality, which would in turn give rise to self sufficiency and avoid dependency on others. Through the Enlightenment this concept of the rational, self-sufficient, autonomous self became the ideal against which to be measured. To be a true individual, an authentic self, meant not being influenced by others or unquestioningly following another’s moral code. It was a call to think for oneself in order to be one’s own person and to make decisions accordingly. In the twentieth century, this way of thinking was taken up by Maslow (1943) who saw self-actualization as the top of his ‘hierarchy of needs’. One of the first tasks for feminism was a need to claim autonomy and agency for women, in short to stake a claim for full personhood, but the problem is that although agency was and is still often presented as a gender neutral ideal, it actually favours a traditionally masculine perspective. A male character who makes his own decisions come what may, and charts his own course, is heroic. A female character who does the same, however, is often seen as selfish, selfobsessed and unkind. It is not how women are supposed to behave. So ideas

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about agency and autonomy often have unspoken gendered assumptions built into them. For example, why should emotion and relatedness to others be considered signs of weakness, or social embeddedness (taking account of others’ needs) seen as an inferior attribute rather than sources of strength? Taking a cooler view of the fully independent and autonomous individual who makes up their own mind without reference to others suggests a psychopathic character rather than a model for heroism. These assumptions and debates have been most fully explored under the term ‘relational autonomy’ which accepts a ‘qualified notion of independent agency’ (Mcnay, 2016, p. 43) where social embeddedness is not necessarily treated as a negative state of affairs, but instead a valuable attribute. At the heart of the discussion is the challenge of modelling a form of ‘autonomy’ that values social embeddedness and takes into account the sometimes severely oppressive social forces which can work to keep women subordinated by, for example, denying them education (to allow critical selfreflection to develop) or access to health care (particularly in terms of sexual health and access to contraception), or in a more covert way by limiting life options by deforming desires and life opportunities where the lack of young women entering the STEM subject area is a case in point. For example, a woman might internalize a message of inferiority, and thus come to see herself as childlike and in need of male guidance, or understand her appearance in terms of the male gaze and male sexual pleasure. It is hard to retain a strong sense of self-regard and the right to speak if one is constantly told to sit down and be quiet, or simply ignored. This is a debate that we will return to around the question of command in Chapter 6. The concept of relational autonomy seeks to recognize that humans are both vulnerable and dependent upon one another, rather than accepting an ideal of conclusive independence and self-sufficiency, and accepts a ‘more or less’ model of autonomy rather than seeing it as an absolute and asking whether the heroines here have such autonomy tries to take account of this. Our heroines might have agency in some aspects of their narrative, but not in others, and the role of social domination and oppression might work to keep them (and perhaps their audience) particularly situated and may not be entirely overt. For example, accepting romance as a narrative goal for heroines, rather than the acquisition of power, or that personal grooming at all times is important, could be discerned directly through the narrative, such as when the Halliwell sisters discuss shopping and outfits in Charmed. But it can be left implicit through mise en scène or through real-world corporate attitudes which may endorse some

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forms of femininity (through commissioning practices or the ‘attractiveness’ of leading actresses) but not others (such as mature leading actresses). Finally, the response of the audience might also reinforce social norms where certain aspects of the heroines are seen as attractive or not, or if their activities are acceptable or not to drift too far from consensual reality and hegemonic norms risks alienating an audience. Since the production context of television remains solidly commercial and as ‘cult’ has increasingly been seen as a route to mainstream success, some subversive zeal for Cult TV heroines seems to have dimmed, but having said that, a post-Weinstein era (a fourth wave of feminism perhaps?) may yet shift the possibilities of representation within the world of television production once more, because there are moments of slippage within the narratives. The role of fantasy to say the unsayable, to bring to consciousness other possible representations of women, is an important one. A mutual exchange exists between the writers’ unconscious and imagination, and the fans’ unconscious and imagination triggered by the narratives that may yet deliver more autonomous heroines of the future. It is tempting, as a part of the analysis of each show, to draw conclusions about the ongoing changes to women’s roles in culture and society (Western society at any rate), and it is certain that I will make such observations throughout the book. However, there is an issue with how deep such analysis can go. I would have liked to be able to carry out the kind of broad analysis that Annis Pratt completed in her groundbreaking book Archetypal Patterns in Women’s Fiction (1982) in which she examined a wide range of women’s novels. Estella Lauter did similar work more broadly in Women as Mythmakers: Poetry and Visual Art by Twentieth Century Women (1984). However, these studies (Jungian influence aside) were looking at what women were saying about themselves, and unfortunately, when it comes to audiovisual texts, although some progress has been made, the film and television industry still privileges male voices in key creative roles: writers, directors, producers and showrunners, for example. It is not possible to view Cult TV as a site where women speak or dream about themselves unequivocally and, as a consequence, the texts cannot be fully subversive. They are the product of a corporate system and cannot be separate from the dominant ideologies circulating more generally within society and culture. However, Cult TV remains a composite creation, a phenomenon not only fabricated by corporations intent on profit but also created by individuals with a point of view, then re-created by intense fan activity, combining to produce something with many cracks, gaps and crevices. Cult TV teeters unresolved,

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affected by the external production and technological environment, but leaving space for fans to fill in where they will, to inhabit the text in a way that encourages active imagination and the transcendent function to be triggered. Therein lies the genius of the fantastic mode. It can do many things simultaneously, speaking to many different audiences, able to move from a niche product for ‘geeks’ to being a high value often mainstream product that somehow still speaks to a minority in a special way. These are polysemic texts, with fantasy as a fifth column. It is a both/and – it is both of culture and of imagination.

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Two heads are better than one

The exploration of Cult TV heroines begins paradoxically with an examination of male/female partnerships where the popular and well-established trope in detective fiction of the male and female duo investigating crime is extended into more fantastical territory. Hybridity is a common feature of Cult TV, and aligning with the perennially popular detective partnerships was a useful way of bringing fantasy and strong female characters into the mainstream, even if the ‘crimes’ investigated ranged from mundane misdeeds to horror, sf and even a metaphysical threat from time itself. The three dramas discussed in this chapter are The Avengers (ITV, 1961–9), which ran for six seasons, but for the sake of brevity (amongst other reasons discussed below) this chapter will focus on the most popular and critically acclaimed Emma Peel era; Sapphire & Steel (ITV, 1979–82), which ran for a briefer six stories; and finally The X-Files (Fox, originally 1993–2002), originally totalling 208 episodes followed by two feature films but then revived in 2016 for a six-episode run and then in 2018 for an eleventh series of ten episodes. The three shows feature a male/female partnership which investigates strange events and unusual crimes. The Avengers and The X-Files investigated a wide range of ‘crimes’ and the tone ranges from humorous to deadly serious, from sf to the possibly supernatural and back again. Sapphire & Steel was more specifically concerned with time itself, which is vaguely personified as a force trying to ‘break in’ to the present. The dramas range from the 1960s to the 2000s, offering a diachronic view of this particular trope of partnership and detection: The Avengers is an action, sf, spy milieu; Sapphire & Steel an unusual cross between Victorian ghost story and time travel; and The X-Files drifts from sf alien investigations to weird science to ghost stories to body horror as the narrative mood dictated. This chapter will explore questions of autonomy and the exercise of power through the representation of equality in these three partnerships. On the

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surface they seem to present a progressive vision of gender equality, but on closer inspection they reproduce only a more coded form of patriarchy. It is, as is so often the case, a mixed picture. In the three shows, there are more ‘damsel in distress’ moments that we might expect, and yet Mrs Peel often rescues herself and Fox Mulder is also the victim of alien abduction, so the possibility of doing things differently coexists alongside more traditional representations. The question of who is in charge along also calls equality into question. Firstly, the partnerships are played out against the backdrop of an opaque metaworld, which operates as veil between the dramatic world and the real world, and while there are mysteries investigated and solved, there are others which remain opaque, particularly when it comes to the question of the power behind the throne: who is the real power in charge? This question of a higher authority beyond the partnership calls its equality into question and remains unclear in all three dramas. Secondly, all three partnerships have been chosen because although they contain elements of eroticism, they are not primarily love stories. Romance is strongly hinted at and even in The X-Files eventually acted upon, but it is not the main driver of the narrative. This is an important distinction, because being the ‘love interest’ in support of the active hero is an all too common narrative trope: the partner or partner-to-be of the hero who passively waits to be taken up as the hero’s prize. The heroines in these three dramas are partners in a different sense – there in their own right with their own skills, abilities, goals and narrative arcs to play out. The gentle flirtation and eroticism is in marked contrast to the warriors discussed in Chapter 4 who are more overtly sexual, but who also suffer more violent consequences. Finally, these are stories which take place within a contemporary frame at the time of broadcast or more accurately, recognizably ‘now’, but not quite here. This imaginary geography runs alongside the everyday world and opens up the possibility of an imaginative realm and as such helps to trigger the imagination and transcendent function for audiences.

The Avengers (1965–8, ITV) Airing in the UK from 1961 through to September 1969, and transmitting 161 episodes, The Avengers was a kind of ‘a crime hunt with kinky, eccentric characters and a cool pop humour’ (Buxton, 1990, p. 100). The scenario, as Chapman described it, featured two secret agents – ‘one a bowler-hatted, umbrella wielding

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Old Etonian, the other a trendy young woman with a penchant for black leather and martial arts’ (Chapman, 2002, p. 1) – who are Britain’s last line of defence against the nefarious schemes of diabolical criminal masterminds. Eventually, it reached audiences in 120 countries, including important airings in the United States and behind the Iron Curtain, and was the first UK series to be shown on a primetime network in America (Chapman, 2002, p. 52). The series underwent major changes over the years, stylistically and narratively, not just in terms of personnel. It began as a fairly straightforward thriller and ended as a fantasy, and charting the changes is not as simple as saying, for example, Cathy Gale (Honor Blackman) was replaced by Emma Peel (Diana Rigg), because the relationship between John Steed (Patrick Macnee) and his female partner, which is remembered by many as the mainstay of the drama, was not in fact established as the central dynamic until Series 2. By Series 4 and 5 with US money on board, there was a trend towards more fantasy which resonated with fans and encouraged their more playful relationship with the text, hence the decision to explore Series 4 and 5 in more detail here. From Series 3 the show’s visual styling, which helped to create the show’s imaginary England, grew increasingly prominent. Brian Clemens, the writer who left a distinct mark on the show, called it a ‘carefully contrived dateless fantasy world depicting a Britain of bowlers and brollies, of charm and muffins for tea, a Britain long since gone – if it ever really existed’ (Rogers, 1989, p. 9), but it cleverly mixed past, present and the futuristic in a unique way. It was a fantasy world with some familiar touch points to the everyday, but the mundane was used as a place from which to launch an expedition to the bizarre and the fanciful. According to Britton and Barker, ‘The Avengers maintained a level of studied artifice that was quite extraordinary given that the series was a mainstream, prime time drama in both Britain and the United States’ (Britton & Barker, 2003, p. 43). The first female star was Honor Blackman as Cathy Gale, first appearing in Mr Teddy Bear (2.1) dressed in leather (designed for ease of movement in a pre-Lycra era). She was initially a guest star but one which made a big impact on audiences, and so Mrs Gale became a regular and it was with her permanent presence in Series 3 that the show began to rise in ratings. Cathy Gale was a different kind of woman with her own skills and abilities, firmly rooted in the real world, ‘a widow, Doctor of Anthropology, judo expert and the original girl on a motorcycle (Blackman had trained as a motorbike dispatch rider during the war’ (Lewis & Stempel, 1993, p. 53). She was very much an equal of Steed’s.

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John Steed (Patrick Macnee) himself was an unusual character. Only promoted to top billing in Series 2 after the actor playing Dr David Keel left for a career in film, he was not an obvious action hero. He represented ‘a type a masculinity that had no need for aggressive displays of machismo, men of charm and good manners who nevertheless possessed nerves of steel: the iron fist concealed beneath the velvet glove’ (Chapman, 2002, p. 62). Macnee later said he had thought about Steed as a kind of Regency dandy in waisted jackets and embroidered waistcoats, but underneath he was steel (Rogers, 1989, p. 14). His costumes may not have been quite so flamboyant as that, but he was a stylish sort of English gentleman, although, like much else in this baroque version of England, the costumes are often not quite what they seem. Steed’s costume evolved over time and was the result of collaboration between the wardrobe department, Macnee himself and his Regent Street tailor. Steed’s suits were ‘consonant’ with both conservative gentleman’s attire and men’s 1960s fashion, particularly the Mod style (originally named for modernist jazz, as opposed to traditional jazz) which itself referenced Regency and nineteenth-century men’s fashions (Britton & Barker, 2003, p. 47). So despite the signature bowler hat and umbrella that Steed so often carried, his costume was a clever mix of establishment and rebel. Steed was a confident man who was able to treat his partners as equals. Clemens paid tribute to Patrick Macnee, the charming gentleman at the centre of the show as being ‘always willing to stand back unselfishly and allow the limelight to fall in his female partners’ (Rogers, 1989, p. 9) something that was true for both the character and the actor playing him. Mrs Emma Peel (Diana Rigg) was introduced in 1966 for Series 4, after Blackman decided to leave for a role in Goldfinger (1964, Guy Hamilton). Mrs Peel, as she was usually referred to, was the widow of an RAF pilot (or at least apparently so, as he eventually turns up to signal the end of her stint on the show); she was a scientist and an expert in karate, with what would become an iconic fashion style. Her arrival coincided with the show’s sale to US television which resulted in higher production values and a shift to 35 mm film, allowing for much greater flexibility in editing, locations and larger stories and from 1966 it was filmed in colour. Emma Peel’s name was a derivation of ‘man appeal’, an idea credited to Marie Donaldson the production press officer (Rogers, 1989, p. 87). Although younger than Blackman, Mrs Peel was still an adult woman, not a girl, something her costume reflected. Like Steed, it was a mixture of conservative and contemporary, ranging from the smart tailored wool suit of The Cybernauts (4.3) to the famous Emmapeelers, jersey catsuits designed by Alun Hughes that were such a feature

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of Series 5 in particular. Along with designs from John Bates (for the fashion house Jean Aaron) who was a fashion designer rather than a television costumier and who has been credited for inventing the miniskirt, Mrs Peel became a fashion icon as ‘The Avengers Collection’ was sold across the UK and said to be the ‘first publicly available clothing collection designed for TV’ (Miller, 1997, p. 47) – Macnee’s relationship with Pierre Cardin was less successful (Britton & Barker, 2003, p. 50). However across the course of an episode, Emma’s costumes could become distinctly more revealing than Steed’s: a sarong in Small Game for Big Hunters (4.16) the ‘principal boy’ Robin Hood outfit in A Sense of History (4.24). The famous ‘Queen of Sin’ outfit of corset, fishnets and spiked dog collar (and carrying a real snake) in A Touch of Brimstone (4.21) was probably the most outrageous and was banned from American television perhaps because its reveal was a full camera tilt from toe to head. The sets however were also interesting. Britton and Barker (2003) discussed the Harry Pottle designed decor and furnishings of the respective apartments where Steed and Mrs Peel reside, noting that Steed’s flat, in Series 4, like his costumes was ‘establishment, but not quite’ as the series was ‘England, but not quite’. Although the decor is conventionally in good taste, like a London gentleman’s club, Pottle built in a number of architectural anomalies, including an odd spatial configuration and a redundant column which create a paradox of good taste and parody. Mrs Peel’s flat was ‘of a commodious, feminised modernism … tempered by a scattering of objects d’art, which range from Meissen figurines on the backs of built in seats … to a semiabstract painting over the liquor cabinet’ (Britton & Barker, 2003, p. 70). However, her front door (at least in this first episode) sports a gigantic Pop Art style eye, covering a security peephole. The design of The Avengers, as it developed its more playful and absurd elements throughout Series 4 and 5, created a ludic world that simultaneously presented an exaggerated version of England in the 1960s alongside a fanciful and highly coloured world of alien plants and killer robots, creating the hallmark of the fantasy genre – a combination of here and now with the crazily impossible. The design of The Avengers thus worked to undermine the everyday verisimilitude that might otherwise be there in a television drama, reminding us of Hume’s point that fantasy seeks to change givens and alter reality (Hume, 2014, p. 20). Episode narratives also tended to have their roots in the everyday world, albeit one of spies and skulduggery, though the path then often wandered off into fantastical hinterlands. However with so many episodes to choose from, it is more

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practical to discuss some common themes rather than try to offer an account of the whole series, which does not offer much of a narrative arc for its characters. As noted above, both Cathy Gale and Emma Peel are physically adept, trained in judo and karate respectively and quite capable of looking after themselves. In fact, although the remarkable partnership of Mrs Peel and Steed is full of flirtation, there is also mutual respect and the narratives did not consistently position one above the other. For example, in their opening scenes together in The Town of No Return (4.1), the pair are shown as literal sparring partners fencing in Emma’s flat. First, playing by the rules, she bests him and, then, through a little trickery, he bests her. One all. In The Cybernauts (4.3), during an investigation of a crime scene, Mrs Peel brings two pieces of key information to the table. Firstly, she knows about the Hirachi Corporation and their claim to have made a new circuit to replace the transistor and the business implications of such an invention. Then she recognizes a specialist karate move that is likely to have been the cause of death. In the following scene, she bests a karate expert in the dojo, still wearing her tailored suit, complete with pencil skirt. In one short sequence, Mrs Peel demonstrates intelligence, knowledge and physical competence. In The Girl from Auntie (4.17), having been kidnapped as she leaves an allnight fancy dress party, Emma spends most of the episode dressed as a bird (strategically placed feathers on a body stocking) in a gilded cage, having become Lot 17 of ‘Art Incorporated’, an organization which prides itself on being able to obtain any object for anyone as long as the price is right. Emma, as always, appears more put out than petrified by this situation. Steed naturally has been searching for his missing partner; however, in final scenes, once Steed creates a diversion, Mrs Peel is able to simply free herself from the cage. In Epic (5.11) however, Steed rescues Emma from a deranged film director who wants a Grand Guignol ending for his film and has placed Mrs Peel on a conveyor belt moving towards a giant buzz saw. Steed switches off the saw, releases Mrs Peel and in a struggle shoots the director with his own gun, but in a coda to the scene, Mrs Peel picks up what she thinks is a stunt chair and hits Steed over the head with it. It is a real chair and she knocks him out. In fact, one of the many websites to offer detailed accounts of the show, www.theavengers.tv includes a rescue scorecard which in Series 4 indicates twenty-four rescues of Emma by Steed to twenty rescues of Steed by Emma. Series 5 was less impressive at thirteen to nine, with some suggestion that things were ‘toned down’ for the US audience, though still an impressive state of affairs for the period. However, as in the costumes, the fine detail does reveal something a little less egalitarian: Emma is fairly often tied up and gagged sometimes in quite intricate

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ways across the two series, whereas Steed, if immobilized at all, is more likely to be rather more simply handcuffed. Mrs Peel never seems greatly bothered by being tied up although she is tied up, captured, kidnapped, more often than Steed, but then she is also very often the one to leap into action before Steed. Perhaps a case of ‘one all’ once again. The final ‘sign off ’ in most episodes usually involved a light exchange between Mrs Peel and Steed, often whilst driving, paddling, galloping off into the proverbial sunset. However, these moments of transportation comedy can also be read as moments where more subversive takes on who is ‘in the driving seat’ are played out. At the end of The Town of No Return (4.1), Mrs Peel’s first appearance, they ride off on a moped, with Mrs Peel driving and Steed sitting side saddle behind her (see Figure 2), echoed in A Sense of History (4.24) where Mrs Peel rides a bike and Steed elects for the side car. In A Surfeit of H20 (4.8), Emma is driving a jeep and arrives to pick up Steed. In Small Game for Big Hunters (4.16) they are in a canoe, with Mrs Peel in front and Steed relaxing behind. He calls out ‘Full speed ahead!’ but Emma coolly replies that they will have to ‘start the other engine’, and Steed belatedly picks up the other paddle. In The Girl from Auntie (4.17) Steed is rather unceremoniously stuffed into the back of a tiny bubble car (or a Messerschmitt KR201 cabriolet micro-car to be precise).

Figure 2  Mrs Peel (Diana Rigg) in the driving seat with Steed (Patrick MacNee) along for the ride The Avengers, The Town of No Return (4.1).

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Series 5 developed a slightly different theme. During the ‘sign off ’ in Escape in Time (5.3) Steed is taking Emma to a party and claims to have a taxi waiting; only it is a vintage 1908 taxi that he then cannot get started. Emma shifts to the driving seat and it starts, and off they go, with Steed in the back and Emma driving. In The See through Man (5.4), Steed gets the ‘rolls out of the mothballs’ as he puts it but once again cannot get it started, Emma gets out the help push, and the car runs off without either of them. In The Bird Who Knew Too Much (5.5), Steed is taking Emma to shoot a pheasant for dinner. She is dressed in avant garde 1960s fashion and he is driving a vintage motor car that, it turns out, this time, he can’t get out of reverse and off they go backwards. These small moments, not central to the drama, nonetheless helped to position the two characters as equals. Through later parts of Series 5 the coda tended to feature with the two characters in their flats sharing a drink more often than in transport, introducing greater emphasis on their domestic setting and on the flirtation between the characters, as audiences were invited to wonder not so much will they/won’t they but ‘if they had’. In Series 6, Mrs Peel’s husband has returned and she comes to say goodbye to Steed, who watches out the window as she gets into the car driven by her husband where he can’t help noticing the distinct resemblance to himself. Mrs Peel was replaced by Tara King (Linda Thorson). Whilst Steed remained the same, his co-stars got ever younger – Honor Blackman was thirty-seven to Macnee’s forty; Diana Rigg twenty-seven to Macnee’s forty-three and Linda Thorson was twenty-one to Macnee’s forty-six) which inevitably led to a less obviously equal partnership. Tara King had no martial arts skills or academic background, though she was not without physical bravery or brains. She was also an actual colleague of Steed’s, reporting to the same boss, code name Mother. This brought the shadowy organization behind Steed to the fore in a new way. It is assumed that this organization is some kind of branch of the British Secret Service, though it is only ever referred to as ‘the organisation’ or ‘the ministry’. During the first two series there were occasional colleagues and some higherranking members featured with names like One-Ten or One-Twelve, but the organization is all but invisible during the Mrs Peel era. This is in contrast to both Sapphire & Steel and The X-Files where shadowy organizations exert their influence and sometimes direct control over the investigative duos. At its height The Avengers was supremely camp, witty, off beat, stylish and sexy and has continued to be an audience favourite. It was ahead of the curve on feminism and in many ways surprisingly it is still an excellent example of an autonomous heroine with freedom and opportunity to act, with the capacities

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and skills to self-govern and a masculine partner who takes her seriously and validates her. It is, despite the occasional revealing costume and tendency to tie up the heroine, a partnership of equality. Only ten years after The Avengers came to an end and two years after a much shorter lived (and less successful) series The New Avengers (ITV, 1976–7) had its run, Sapphire & Steel came to the UK screen. It was a cryptic and far more disconcerting series anchored by a different sort of detective partnership.

Sapphire & Steel (1979–82, ITV) Sapphire & Steel has at times been touted as ‘ITV’s answer to Doctor Who’ (Callaghan, 2013, p. 1) and was broadcast in an early evening slot between 1979 and 1982, presumably with the same family audience in mind, although its tone was considerably darker. In fact, P. J. Hammond the creator and writer of the show (we would probably call him the showrunner now) was quoted as saying he thought ‘the programme would appeal to children and adults alike, but avoids inevitable comparisons with Dr Who: “Whenever we felt we were getting close to Dr Who we tried to do something completely different”’ (Hawkins, 1979, pp. 5–6). Sapphire & Steel was a relatively short-lived series, with only six stories told over thirty-four short episodes. However, the year 1979 was a high water mark for the cost of drama production at ITV (Johnston & Turnock, 2005, p. 51), and although somewhat stagey by modern standards, the production values were high. Its broadcast also unfortunately coincided with a series of escalating strike actions by the broadcast unions that sometimes left the screens dark for weeks at a time (Johnston & Turnock, 2005, p. 51), all of which hampered the development of Sapphire & Steel as transmission was postponed leaving gaps between episodes that damaged its ability to build up a core audience. It makes it all the more astonishing that such a series, which (barring two episodes) has never been repeated on terrestrial television in the UK, should still have a following all these years later. Although it does not reach the levels of adulation lavished on Doctor Who, the drama has never quite vanished from memory. The show has tended to divide critics. As Wright put it, ‘Sapphire and Steel remains the most perplexing British television science fiction series to date. Whilst its premise is simple – two eponymous “time detectives” of mysterious origin act to safeguard the integrity of the temporal order – its execution produced a programme suffused with ambiguity’ (Wright in Cook & Wright, 2006, p. 192).

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In 2010, Angelini noted that the show had ‘maintained a crucial place in cult circles for the originality of its conception and for the seriousness with which it was produced’ (Angelini in Abbott, 2010, p. 241). Perplexing, oblique, esoteric, its final story was even more so, offering fragments of backstory before stranding the two protagonists in a pocket of time forever, but Sapphire & Steel did not provide ‘infodumps’ for the audience and there was never any real explanations, only occasional snippets of dialogue which gave puzzling clues, leaving the audience to make up their own minds about the two main characters and their motives. The ambiguity, the uncanny atmosphere and off kilter characters have ensured its place within the Cult TV genre. P. J. Hammond had worked as script editor on a number of UK show including the popular police drama Z Cars (1962–78, BBC), and the six Assignments as the untitled stories were known (only Assignment 5 was not written by Hammond) move along as crisply as any police procedural of the era. Hammond explained that the origins of the show came from my desire to write a detective story, into which I wanted to incorporate Time. I’ve always been interested in Time, particularly the ideas of J. B. Priestley and H.G. Wells, instead of having them backwards and forwards in Time, it was about Time breaking in, and having set the precedent I realised the potential that it offered with two people whose job it was to stop the break-ins. (Fisher, 2014, p. 2)

Sapphire and Steel function as detectives, examining the scene of the crime with a forensic eye, putting forward theories regarding the ‘trigger’ and piecing together clues to solve the mystery of how Time is being disrupted. So Sapphire and Steel were ‘detectives’, at least of a sort, sent to handle time ‘irregularities’ (as the opening voiceover puts it) created by creatures trying to break into time’s corridor. They were non-human and possessed a never entirely specified number of skills and abilities including telepathy and the ability to turn time back at least temporarily. They investigated and restored the proper order of things, even if their expertise was something the humans within their orbit did not understand. Indeed, one of the many elements that made this such an unsettling watch is that Sapphire and Steel are there to fix a problem, but not necessarily to rescue any human victims; indeed, they might be sacrificed if necessary. The two lead actors were already well known by the time they appeared in Sapphire & Steel, both having starred in the kind of prime time quirky drama like that the late 1960s and early 1970s television did so well. Steel was played by

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David McCallum who was best known for The Man from Uncle (NBC, 1964–8), whilst Joanna Lumley was fresh from her role as Purdy in The New Avengers (ITV, 1976–7). In the first Assignment as it was called, Sapphire and Steel arrive at an isolated house where the parents of Helen (Tamasin Bridge) and Rob (Steven O’Shea) suddenly disappear mid-sentence whilst reading their daughter nursery rhymes. Rob, the responsible older brother, goes out to a phone box to call for help, indicating the remoteness of the house, but only moments after his return there is a knock at the door. A voice gives the boy’s name. ‘You asked for help’, it says. Rob opens the door, and Steel walks smartly in, wearing a nondescript suit and tie. Sapphire follows him and closes the door, wearing a long blue dress with hints of classical Greek drapery but flowing 1970s sleeves making its style difficult to place chronologically. These first costumes immediately establish their characters. Steel is all business and direct to the point of being brusque. Sapphire is apparently softer but with an ambiguous charm. Although much of the credit for the uncanny atmosphere of Sapphire & Steel, which drew heavily on the Victorian ghost story as well as detective fiction and sf, tends to go to P. J. Hammond as the creator and writer of most of the episodes, credit is also due to Director Sean O’Riordan for his articulation of the scripts into the audiovisual medium. As can been seen in the first assignment, the unsettling atmosphere relies as heavily on the mise en scène, camera and sound, as upon narrative and character. The mise en scène makes the exact era of the first story difficult to pinpoint, even though the assumption is that it is contemporary. It is set within an old, maze-like house, full of clocks, sometimes ticking, sometimes ominously silent. Doors, passageways, landings and stairs (all liminal spaces ‘betwixt and between’) feature as settings for action more often than actual rooms, with the possible exception of the kitchen. This use of liminal spaces for action continues in the other assignments. The use of camera angles compounds the off-kilter nature of the mise en scène by positioning the actors in unusual ways. The camera oftentimes avoids the standard grammar of framing (wide establishing shot, mid-shot, close-up) in lieu of extended long shots, characters speaking from outside the frame, or with their backs to the camera. Sometimes the camera is high above the shoulder of the characters, angled down, or low and angled up, all of which helps to create and sustain the eerie and unsettling milieu, intended to draw the audience into the mystery. It is worth paying attention to the compositional modality of the drama because this is already demonstrating to the audience that the setting for the

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narrative is ‘not quite here and now’. The settings for the assignments are often old places – the farm house in Assignment 1, the lost and found junk shop in Assignment 3, the country house in Assignment 5 – where time criss-crosses itself into a palimpsest, evocatively suggesting a past that continues to exist within the present, creating, as The Avengers did, an imaginary geography of a Britain that exists beyond the everyday. It also helps to set up Sapphire and Steel themselves as ‘not quite human’, and although they say they are there to help, the framing raises a suspicion that their presence should be alarming rather than comforting. When the two speak to each other, they are often framed directly face to face in a tight two shot, which implies an intimacy but one which is not borne out in their discussion. One exception is in Assignment 5 where the two, who are pretending to be husband and wife, do kiss. They are telepathically talking about the case in quite matter of fact tones, but Sapphire leans forward to kiss Steel on the mouth as he is gently smiling, but the camera cranes upwards just as they kiss to show another character coming into the room, so the kiss may have been just to keep up their Miles and Virginia personae. Assignment 5 is the one story which Hammond did not write. Sapphire is Steel’s partner rather than vice versa and the partnership dynamics are quite different to the seemingly easy equality of The Avengers. Of course, the tone of the two shows is different, but in Sapphire & Steel, there is a subtle hierarchy at work. Sapphire follows Steel into the house, and the first words she speaks are to excuse Steel’s behaviour. ‘He’s a shade too serious but you’ll get used to him’, she tells Rob. Later in the same episode, Steel almost rudely tells her to ‘read the rhyme, stop when I say, go back when I say, don’t make any mistakes not even a letter’. Sapphire replies, ‘I know’, a small moment of resistance to his, what we would now probably call ‘mansplaining’. Steel not only entered the house first but always moved towards danger first. Sapphire may be a non-human character but she seems, at least at first, there only to support Steel and to soften his edges. She is supposed to be the ‘diplomat’ (‘amongst other things’, she replies in Episode 2), there to sweet talk humans doing what is required, rather like the polite wife of a corporate executive who is engaged in hostessing duties. The ‘softening’ of Sapphire’s own alien edges is reinforced throughout the first assignment where she seems to spend a lot of time cooking, cleaning and looking after the children. Towards the end of Episode 1, Sapphire embarks upon a charm offensive to win the teenage Rob over in an odd mix of motherly domesticity and glamorous seductress. Rob comes upon her in the kitchen, setting the table, cleaning glasses and asking

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where the salt and pepper are. At the same time, she appears in a number of different outfits including an alluring red dress that prompts Rob to tell her she’s beautiful. In Episode 5 Steel is not happy and snaps at Sapphire ‘I told you to watch the child at all times’ meaning Rob’s little sister who may have been instrumental in causing Time to break through in the first place. Sapphire only replies, ‘And I do.’ The arrival of another character, Lead (Val Pringle) in Episode 4, serves to underscore Sapphire’s domestic persona and further subtly undermine her status. Lead makes a big show of being hungry and says to Sapphire ‘Are you still the cook I remember?’ to which she smiles in reply. In the same episode she seems to have made him some kind of stew and an entire fruit cake. Whilst eating, Lead says to Steel that ‘Jet sends her love’, implying that Jet was Steel’s previous partner. This is underlined as he goes on to ask Sapphire if it is a difficult job they are on. She agrees, to which he replies, ‘Be good training for you then.’ This would seem to more than just imply that she is a junior partner and less experienced than Steel. A small, passing comment in the grand scheme of the narrative, but it all serves to reinforce that hierarchy within the partnership. A ‘damsel in distress’ trope is also more apparent in Sapphire & Steel than in The Avengers. Whilst this is certainly not the central driving force of the narrative, it happens enough in the other stories that Callaghan’s guide to the show includes a section for every Assignment pointing out where Sapphire has been in peril. Steel does have a habit of being first through the door, or up the stairs towards danger, but by Episode 3 in Assignment 1, the ‘time creature’ (a disc of light) has trapped Sapphire in a painting of a cottage, where an English Civil War execution is to be re-enacted with Sapphire as the victim. At first strong, she quite quickly becomes afraid saying ‘Help me, Steel’, which he does. However, as the series develops, both operatives seem to find themselves in various kinds of danger. In Assignment 2, Steel is in danger of possession by a dead RAF pilot; in Assignment 4, they are both trapped in an old photograph; in Assignment 5, Steel prevents Sapphire from stabbing herself with a knife, though she then threatens him with a gun; and in final episode, Steel is physically overpowered by a being who is able to throw him to the floor, but this does not result in the ‘one-all’ of The Avengers. There is some movement across the series and Sapphire’s character does develop and gain in confidence. Of course, Sapphire is supposed to be the nice one. She is glamorous and can be charming, she might care for the children, but even in Assignment 1 her character is not unequivocally empathetic, as her seduction of Rob demonstrates. Sapphire is better at gaining people’s

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trust, she has more sparkle, against Steel’s toughness and inflexibility, but in the final analysis, despite the seduction, she is not nice. In Assignment 2, she goes along with the sacrifice of Tully (Gerald James), the human ghost hunter; in Assignment 4, she lies to the human Liz (Alyson Shapiro) about the fate of her friend who had been trapped in a photograph and then burned. In Assignment 5 she ignores Steel’s telepathic summons in order to finish a card game, and by the final assignment she is the one (like Mrs Peel) who begins to unravel the situation. She is the first to suspect a trap, pulling Steel aside for a chat. She wants to know why the technician Silver (David Collings) is there. Steel hasn’t really considered it, but Sapphire has. ‘Think about it for once, Steel’, she says brusquely moving into a mid two shot, and standing over Steel who is sitting at a desk (see Figure 3). She is in the more dominant position. ‘Supposing there’s nothing for us to wait for. What if it is waiting for us?’ So Sapphire is presented as the junior partner at first, with her edges softened by a combination of feminine domestic duties, glamorous seduction and moments of being the damsel in distress, before starting to take a more active role in their situation. Steel too changes albeit almost infinitesimally becoming more apt to speak to humans, even chatting in Assignment 5, though the country house

Figure 3  Sapphire (Joanna Lumley) stands over Steel (David McCallum) as she finally gets him to realize that they are in a trap, Sapphire & Steel, Assignment 6 (6.4).

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party scenario makes that an essential part of their cover. In Assignment 6, he uncharacteristically tries to save the human woman he thinks is being held against her will, only for her to turn out to be a willing partner, demonstrating a slight rebalancing of the power dynamics in their relationship away from gender expectations. However in the overall world of the narrative, the question of who is in charge of ‘who governs the cosmos remains unclear, although the presence of a hooded figure during the opening titles alludes to some distant authority figure remains an open one’ (Wright in Cook & Wright, 2006, p. 196). Although The Avengers has One Ten who assigned tasks in the early episodes, and Mother in the later episodes, during the Mrs Peel era, there was little evidence of anyone directly controlling the agents. In Sapphire & Steel, however, the opening monologue hints at a directing force as it finishes ‘Sapphire and Steel have been assigned!’ which suggests someone is doing the assigning. The final Assignment reveals a force which seems to have sent them to a place, a seemingly deserted service station, where there is no time, ‘not anymore’ as Silver says in Episode 1, ‘It’s a kind of pocket. Like a vacuum.’ The team discuss a ‘higher authority’ though not in any specific detail. Nonetheless Steel seems convinced that ‘they’ are working against them because he turned down a job offer, as did Sapphire, who wonders if that’s why the two of them work together so well, but their conversation finishes with Steel suggesting that ‘they’ resent the pair’s achievements, till Sapphire adds ‘more than that. They resent our independence’. The forces that sent them there are never fully revealed, and in a famously open ending, they are left in limbo in a room that is in middle of nothing and nowhere, perhaps only for being so successful a partnership. It is this nihilistic, cliff hanger of an ending that has in many ways helped to cement Sapphire & Steel’s place in the pantheon of Cult TV. Lumley’s portrayal of the inhuman Sapphire raised the character above a typical female role with demonstrations of power and what turns out to be a questionable sense of empathy. Although the narrative initially worked to create a subtle hierarchy within the partnership that was not there in The Avengers, over time Sapphire gains in stature, moving from a relative lack of autonomy in investigative decision-making in the first Assignment to having much greater autonomy and even leadership in the final Assignment. However, the ambiguous nature of the final cliffhanger leaves questions about the overall autonomy of both the main characters with the suspicion that they have been deliberately imprisoned by their own side. Both Sapphire and Steel might have competence and sufficient self-regard enough to act, but the external environment of the

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powers that ultimately ‘assign’ them to investigations seems, in the end, to take away the freedom and autonomy of both characters, because they were ‘too successful’.

The X-Files (1993–2002, 2016–18, Fox) Eleven years after Sapphire & Steel, The X-Files became the new partnership investigating weird and fantastical events, this time in the United States. FBI agents Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) and Fox ‘Spooky’ Mulder (David Duchovny) investigated X-files, ‘FBI-speak for those cases that rational science and investigative techniques cannot solve – that is, those involving suspected cases of extra-terrestrial encounters and the supernatural’ (Koven in Lavery, 2010, 37). It was a drama blending the mimetic and the fantastic, intended to open up not the impossible but rather ‘extreme possibilities’ as Scully so often put it. Even yet, one of the most written-about, critically acclaimed shows with a loyal and active fan base, it seemed to have had its day with the second feature film I Want to Believe (Chris Carter, 2008). However, the show was revived in 2016 in a short run series, whose success led to another, longer series being commissioned and broadcast in 2018. When the reboot was announced, one writer noted, ‘Internet fan sites had a near melt down, generating a slew of web content about the series’ return, with related conversations buzzed with excitement; Carter even premiered the first episode at New York Comic Con 2015 (Geller, 2016, p. 2). However, as noted below, with Gillian Anderson definitively hanging up Scully’s hat at the conclusion of Season 11, this is likely to be the end for The X-Files. Just as The Avengers and Sapphire & Steel had created an imaginary geography of England, The X-Files created an imaginary geography of the United States, one which included genetic mutants, urban legends, ghosts and malicious technology, while running through it all was a possible government conspiracy to cover up alien activity. The X-Files was in many ways the show that captured the zeitgeist of the 1990s, but more than that it is also credited with changing the nature of the television industry itself. Along with the various iterations of Star Trek discussed in Chapter 6, The X-Files was key to shifting from the ‘network era’ of TV I to TV II where a smaller but more affluent audience could be enough to ensure a show’s success. Reeves, Rodgers and Epstein argued that Fox licensed merchandise and used the show to ‘multiply its revenue streams’ (in

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Lavery, Hague & Cartwright, 1996, p. 31) because active fans consumed ancillary products and therefore did not need the ratings alone to make it viable. They later adjusted their view to suggesting The X-Files heralded the start of TV III. By cleverly courting several pre-existing fan cultures such as UFOs, hard tech/ hard sf, serial killer, supernatural and dark fantasy (Lavery, Hague, & Cartwright, 1996, p. 32) and thus aggregating several niche groups, combined with revenue from commodity sales, the show was given a chance to thrive. In this scenario, Cult TV was no longer a marginal phenomenon and demonstrates Cult TV’s role in shaping the wider television business, highlighting the importance of including the external environment in considerations of the phenomenon. The show was the creation of Chris Carter, a screenwriter for 20th Century Fox whose approach to the show was to work at keeping the narrative grounded in reality, saying that the goal was ‘credible, believable characters and credible, believable situations dealing with incredible and unexplainable phenomena’ (Vitaris, 1995, p. 22), and to deliver a certain standard with ambitious storylines that stopped it from becoming just another precinct drama. A special X-Files edition of Cinefantastique in 1995 included interviews with all the key production team who made it clear that they thought of each episode as a movie in its own right. Chris Carter called the episodes ‘little movies’ (Vitaris, 1995, p. 20); R. W. Goodwin the co-executive producer noted that ‘with The X-Files every episode is a brand new movie. They [the production team] get to create a whole new world each time’ (p. 21); Rob Bowman director and producer pointed out ‘so much of television is repetitious’, he observed, ‘The X-Files really tries to be a movie every week’ (p. 83), and John Bartley the director of photography described the show’s lighting design as balancing ‘every teaspoon of light with a pound of blood-sucking darkness’ (Probst, 1995, p. 28). The show won a wide range of awards for its technical craft in sound editing, make-up, art direction and cinematography including an Emmy for John Bartley in 1996. The X-Files is also credited with being one of the first shows to really spark internet engagement from fans, and by 2010 Abbott was pointing out that while fan conventions used to be seen a ‘freak shows’ for ‘has-been’ actors; now they were a crucial market for the networks and studios to premiere new programmes and to garner fan loyalty while the shows are still on the air (p. 1). The X-Files fandom was vibrant and is regarded as the source of the term ‘shippers’ (‘relationshippers’) in internet circles with some regarding the story of the week as of secondary interest (fanlore.org, 2019). Fanlore.org is a not for profit organization run by and for fans, suggests that there have been three waves of X-Files fandom, including discussion groups, fan fiction with its own lively

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groups of sub-genres and tropes – ‘body swap’, ‘500 words and an eggbeater’, ‘Bed Sharing’ and ‘Aliens made them do it’, plus artworks, fan comics, fanvids and fanzines. The two X-Files revival series have continued to inspire fan reworking with a large number of alternate endings to the William/Jackson Van De Kamp storyline for example. As one fan wrote, ‘My take on what happened after the camera panned off and ended. Fixing all of CC’s [Chris Carter’s] mistakes and reuniting a family’ (halcyonwords, 2018). Even in 2018, the fans still cared. The X-Files also caught the attention of academics in the early stages of exploring Cult TV. In Deny All Knowledge, written partway through Season 3, the editors claimed that The X-Files had ‘experimented – televisually, narratologically, semiotically – with the medium in innovative ways (Lavery, Hague & Cartwright, 1996, p. 3). For a long time, in academic circles, The X-Files was almost synonymous with Cult TV, all of which helped to develop its ‘high end’ reputation. At the heart of the show were two characters Fox Mulder and Dana Scully whom the fans celebrated for their differences to traditional gender roles. Mulder is the believer, seeking answers to the apparent alien abduction of his sister Samantha, an ‘eccentric but brilliant’ detective who ‘moves outside accepted patterns of rational, linear, patriarchal investigation and opens himself up to insights traditionally connected with the feminine’ (in Lavery, Hague & Cartwright, 1996, p. 104). He is also, though it is never particularly emphasized, an Oxford university-trained psychologist, with a PhD on the occult. Scully was his scientific and rational foil. Even though it was the 1990s, and more effort was made to avoid the most obvious gender essentialism, Scully’s introduction in the pilot episode is illuminating because she is so clearly placed within the institutions of patriarchy. She is introduced to the audience as she arrives at the FBI headquarters in Washington, where she is interviewed by three older, grey haired men, including the Cigarette Smoking Man, Mulder’s shadowy antagonist and possible father (William B Davis). The Smoking Man starts out standing in the corner but moves over so that the three men are lined up across from her, with the desk between them. They go through her credentials and training, establishing that she is a medical doctor and that she has only been in the FBI for two years. She is assigned to the X-Files and there is some mention of Mulder’s background and that he is also known as ‘Spooky’. When she meets Mulder he also spends some time going through her qualifications. In fact within the first six minutes of the Pilot, Scully is established as a qualified scientist in medicine and physics, with Mulder making a point of calling her ‘Doctor Scully’ with a sarcastic emphasis

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and mentioning her thesis on Einstein. Her qualifications have been (over) emphasized twice in a short space of time within what is a male-dominated environment. The professional scientist Scully has to be re-emphasized several times, in a way that Fox’s credentials do not. She is encroaching on his terrain, not the other way around with the implication that she is becoming his partner and not the other way around, as we saw with Sapphire & Steel. In fact, Scully’s ‘work’ and that of the X-files in general, being scrutinized by panels of mostly men, are a trope that crops up on a semi-regular basis throughout the rest of the show. As with The Avengers and Sapphire & Steel the hierarchy in the relationship can afford to be hazy because ultimate authority seems to lie elsewhere in FBI senior management. Mulder and Scully do represent at least a partial inversion of the usual gender stereotypes where Scully represented logic and rationality and Mulder relied on his intuition, but whilst seeming a welcome reversal, the trouble is, as Kornfield (2016) points out, that the more traditionally feminine qualities in this scenario, that is, emotional intelligence and intuition, are only rewarded when they are demonstrated by men, and female partners are not rewarded by closing a case when they stray into this territory. As Badley pointed out, ‘The brilliant, Oxfordeducated Mulder appropriates “women’s ways of knowing,” leaving Scully with nothing he cannot also claim, and disallows her subjectivity as a woman’ (Badley, 2000, p. 69). Mulder is allowed by the narrative to see much more actual evidence of the supernatural than Scully, who tends to arrive a ‘beat’ too late. She is ‘disallowed from seeing’. Scully is certainly far from being a traditional damsel in distress, often being seen running and shooting, for example, and yet it is an abduction from her own house in Season 2 that really sets up Scully’s storyline, one revolves around her health and the very feminine question of motherhood. In fact, ‘Scully is left with the most traditional of roles: that of the monstrous and sorrowful mother’ (Badley, 2000, p. 84). Although narratively complicated, Scully has three children and two pregnancies none of which she controls, but nonetheless, motherhood becomes the focus of her own narrative trajectory. For example, in Season 5’s two parter, Christmas Carol (5.6) and Emily (5.7), Scully admits to her own mother that the cancer (caused by the abduction) means she cannot have children, but then a mysterious phone call draws her to a case involving a young girl called Emily whose DNA seems to match that of Scully’s sister, but is later revealed to be Scully’s own. Scully tries to adopt the girl, but Emily appears to be a human alien hybrid created by the shadowy Syndicate,

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and her condition deteriorates and she dies, leaving Scully at the funeral chapel grieving over a coffin filled only with sandbags. In En Ami (7.15) Scully agrees to a meeting and trip with the Smoking Man (author of so many of conspiracies) who claims to have the cure to all diseases. She agrees to go with him but then wakes up in a cabin wearing pyjamas instead of her clothes and accuses the Smoking Man of drugging her. He claims she was merely exhausted and he was trying to make her comfortable. By Requiem (7.22) Scully is having bouts of nausea and later tells her boss and friend Skinner (Mitch Pileggi) that although she cannot understand it, she is pregnant. The through-line narrative of Season 8 concerns Scully’s pregnancy, threats to her and the unborn child such as Deadalive (8.15) and Essence (8.20) and the season finale revolves around the eventual birth of William. Mulder takes Scully home and after admiring the baby the two share a kiss. By the middle of Season 9 however, with Mulder missing and William’s unusual nature becoming clearer, Scully is told that William is the key to another alien invasion and that the conspirators are looking for him. Scully decides the only way to save him is to give him up for adoption, a decision that, at the start of the revival Season 10, she is still lamenting, telling Mulder in My Struggle (10.1) that she knows it was for the child’s good, but that she cannot help but think of him. Later she says, ‘I hate myself because I didn’t have the courage to stand by him.’ In Babylon (10.5), both Mulder and Scully are having fantasies about life with William and looking at baby pictures. The focus of Season 11 is once again on William. The series opens with Scully having seizures and visions connected to William whom she still wants to find. She is in a coma reminding the audience of One Breath (2.8), and indeed, Scully lying inert on a hospital bed with a grieving Mulder by her side is something of a visual trope for the series. This episode also contains the revelation that William is the result of a medical rape and that the Smoking Man is William’s father, who impregnated Scully whilst she was unconscious in his cabin. In a scene where Scully is looking for hope, she tells Mulder, ‘I believed I could protect our son and I failed.’ Motherhood, the loss of her child and the desire to find him had become the absolute foundation stone of Scully’s character in the revival which continued in Season 11. In Plus One (11.3) Scully and Mulder go to investigate twins Judy and Chucky engaged in a game of telepathic hangman. Judy tells Scully she is getting old and dried up which Scully brushes off, but then later turns to Mulder for reassurance; in fact, she goes to his bed in the motel and asks him to hold her. The two discuss having more children which Scully says she wants, despite the medical

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Figure 4  Scully (Gillian Anderson) mourns for another dead child, The X-Files, Ghouli (11.5).

impossibility. In Ghouli (11.5) drawn to the case by shared visions with William, in an emotionally intense scene, Scully speaks to what she believes might be the body of her son whilst taking a sample of his DNA (see Figure 4). She finally comes face to face with William later in the same episode, although she does not realize it. William/Jackson is able to manipulate perception and appears to her as the author of a book she has been reading. William goes on the run, but in the final episode, My Struggle IV (11.10) Mulder goes to look for him on his own, leaving Scully behind. It is an episode that suffers from trying to tie up all the loose ends of the plot, but culminates in what seems like an excess of father–son murder. William (impersonating Mulder) is shot by the Smoking Man, but then the real Mulder in grief retaliates by shooting the Smoking Man. In the meantime, Scully has found out from Skinner about the implantation of William, and despite the fact that she has been grieving for this child for seventeen years, to the point of sharing visions with him, she announces to Mulder that he was only an experiment, an idea that she was never mother to. Not only that, but despite all the cancer scares and missing ova, she is now pregnant with Mulder’s child and the series ends with the two embracing on the quay side. As one disappointed reviewer put it, ‘Chris Carter let Scully languish this entire episode only to use her as a baby vessel again. Because, you know, that’s apparently all she’s good for’ (Pantozzi, 2018). Indeed, Gillian Anderson herself

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did not appear to be entirely happy with this resolution for her character. Before the season had even aired, Anderson had already indicated this would be her last outing as Scully. At a press conference to promote the new season, she was asked if it would be a satisfying end for her character. Anderson took some time to respond before saying it was a good question and ‘I’m not quite sure how to answer that question. Let’s say I’ll think about it’ (Bucksbaum, 2018). After the final episode had aired, and apparently in response to the mixed fan reaction, Anderson posted a gif on Twitter of Scully face palming with the words ‘Oh boy oh boy do I ever hear you’ (Anderson, 2018). Scully is presented as a professional, capable woman but within the narrative she becomes embroiled in Mulder’s quest to find answers to his sister’s disappearance and prove the reality of alien life and interventions on earth – a quest which more or less comes to an end in Seasons 6 and 7. Scully’s loyalty to her relationship with Mulder is one element that might be said to constrain her agency, although it is presented as the character’s choice, but like Sapphire, her autonomy is also undermined by the institution within which she works: the source of ultimate authority. Scully is investigated herself, forced to defend her work, to explain the inexplicable, always undermined by evidence that goes missing. She is abducted and experimented upon and forced to give up her child. Despite The X-Files sometimes strenuous efforts to avoid falling into obvious gender stereotypes, the narrative still contrives to make Mulder the hero with Scully as his helper, support act and mother of his child. Although they both require rescuing at times (e.g. Scully at the end of the first feature film often known as Fight the Future in 1998, then Mulder at the end of I Want to Believe in 2008), for Scully, the FBI agent, the scientist and the doctor, her final narrative reward is not success, or knowledge, or freedom but to be mother to Mulder’s child. Although all three of the series discussed in this chapter have moments of unease, lack of clarity and indecision, The X-Files is the text that seemed to activate the transcendent function for audiences most clearly. Its deft navigation of territory wandered from scientific rationality to instinctual belief and the paranormal, with complex and long narrative arcs that rewarded close attention ignited fan discussion. At its centre however was the close relationship between the two lead characters, at times confrontational and argumentative, at other times tender and melancholic, that drew the fans into caring about the characters in a way that The Avengers with its light-hearted banter and quick solutions, or Sapphire & Steel with its inhuman and inexplicable characters had not. Mulder and Scully dealt not only with the darkness brought by the nature of their cases

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but with the potential for lost hope and the power of belief. ‘I Want to Believe’ was the tagline for the show (drawn from a poster that Mulder put up in the X-Files office), and it became the hope for the fans. Perhaps what they wanted to believe in most was the relationship between the two main protagonists and from that point of view at least, perhaps the ending did not disappoint, although the numbers of fan fiction pieces rewriting the ending might suggest otherwise. The heroines in all three shows are situated with a male partner, although the partnerships are presented on the surface as being one of equals, the detail suggests this is not quite as deep set as it appeared. The imaginative geography of all three shows put the partnerships in the ‘not quite here and now’, and against a backdrop of ill-defined but sometimes downright hostile authority, but made room for the possibility of equality in a way that triggered audience’s imaginative engagement, even if the endings for the heroines must qualify that equality. Mrs Peel’s husband is found and she leaves Steed to return to her marriage and it is noticeable that Mr Peel drives them away, leaving Emma back in the passenger seat: her interlude with the egalitarian minded Steed over and ‘normal life’ resumed. Sapphire and Steel remain trapped, floating in limbo forever by the transient beings at the behest of the higher authority who governs their activities for crimes of being too successful a partnership. And Scully, having been absent for much of the final episode, announces yet another miracle pregnancy to create, deus ex machina, a conventionally happy ending for the partners now become a couple. These erotically charged partnerships were more collaborative, more active, creative and dynamic than those portrayed in other kinds of mainstream drama at the time. They offered the audience a playground of images where equality and complementarity were to the fore, and although in the end they reverted to fairly mainstream drama where masculinity and femininity are not fundamentally challenged, the edges were softened sufficiently to allow the audience to open up their creativity using images from the show. Of course, the heroines do not entirely escape the tendrils of patriarchy which inevitably pervade all the series, but they were active, self-governing characters with skills and capacity to act: Mrs Peel was physically adept and smart; Sapphire was able to coolly scrutinize the evidence; Scully had a trained mind and resolve, and their partners were challenging, erotic and if not always precisely nurturing, neither were they hostile or hindering. Although The X-Files made a more recent return to the screen, it is interesting to note that these male/female investigative partnerships seem to have migrated from fantasy into more shows firmly rooted in consensual reality such as

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Bones (2005–17, Fox) and The Mentalist (2008–15, CBS). What begins as too fanciful an idea to have a place in reality and is only available in the playful realm of fantasy opens up imaginative space in which to consider a different kind of relationship. The verve with which audiences took up the relationships, restating them in their own stories and artworks to linger with the psychological resonance evoked by the characters, suggests Eco’s ‘magic flavour’ was held onto until it could be experienced in a more conscious (everyday) fashion.

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Witches: Between feminine and feminist

Witches seem to be an old story, one that takes us back into the mists of time. We know how it goes – evil handmaids of the devil, stealing babies, scattering curses and corrupting communities – but such images of women engaged in malevolent magic are a far cry from the depiction of the lovely Samantha Stephens (Elizabeth Montgomery) or the young, cute and sassy Charmed Ones, whose power derives from a long line of female witches beginning with their ancestor Melinda Warren, every bit as young, cute and sassy. Their heritage belongs to a different story about witches, one that is not quite so old, where witches are wise women, perhaps the misremembered heirs of a pagan past; healers and midwives, horribly persecuted by a narrow-minded patriarchy seeking to keep them in their place. This is the vision of witchcraft preferred by television drama – fragrant, fashionable, helpful and seemingly woman-centred – but the history of witchcraft is not simple; this chapter will unpick some of the history of witchcraft, before going on to consider the heroines of witchy Cult TV. Witch-centred stories (by which I mean witches are the central protagonists as opposed to the monster who must be destroyed by the hero) had been more common in the cinema than on TV, often taking the form of light-hearted romantic comedies. Two particularly influential films were I Married a Witch (1942, Rene Clair), starring Veronica Lake, and Bell, Book and Candle (1958, Richard Quine), starring Kim Novak. Both feature a storyline where the young witch casts a love spell only to find herself really falling for its target, risking her powers in the process. The Italian horror film Suspiria (1977, Dario Argento), remade in 2018 by Director Luca Guadagnino, depicts a much darker vision of witchcraft, but the protagonist is the innocent heroine and it is really an example of the ‘witch as monster’ theme. Another Hollywood success was The Witches of Eastwick (1987, George Miller) which returned to the romcom theme, although with an edge, and followed three friends who accidentally conjure up their ‘perfect man’ bringing mayhem to their sleepy New England town. The

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Craft (1996, Andrew Fleming) focused on the desire to belong and its potentially high cost at a Los Angeles High School, while Practical Magic (1998, Griffin Dunne) was a return to the romcom storylines of the earlier films. The Love Witch (2016, Anna Biller) is a pastiche of 1970s schlock horror but another version of the miscast love spell. On television the witch made regular appearances in many Cult TV shows but usually as the monster or villain. For example, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the ‘big bad’ of Season 6 is Buffy’s good friend Willow (Alyson Hannigan) whose grief over the murder of her girlfriend is channelled into an addiction to magic and she becomes an apocalypse-bringing monster. Another example is Supernatural (2005–20, The CW) where witches appear as opponents to the monster-hunting Winchester brothers semi-regularly from Season 3 onwards, with Rowena (Ruth Connell), the mother of the king of hell himself, the most regular witch character. Sometimes she helps out, but only if there is something in it for her. Likewise, Constance the Stone Witch (Rayisa Kondracki) is the Season 1 baddie in Wynonna Earp who is eventually bested by Wynonna and buried in a salt field. It is also interesting that in Doctor Who The Witchfinders (11.8) the Doctor herself is briefly arrested as a witch in seventeenth-century Lancashire, a narrative turn that would be difficult to imagine for any of the previous male incarnations. Showtime’s Penny Dreadful (2014–16) began with vampires before moving onto witches in due course. Vanessa Ives (Eva Green) is one of the central characters in this ensemble drama and one who has magical gifts. At first she wants to be good; however, in the second season, against all advice, Vanessa chooses to use black magic from a forbidden book to fight back against another witch Evelyn Poole (Helen McRory). The final season ended with an ivory-gowned Vanessa, angelically lit by an excess of candlelight, being killed by single gunshot from the man she loved. Vanessa is supposed to be a powerful character, but in fact she never exercises any power on her own behalf, and in the end begs to be killed, leaving it only as a more sophisticated version of the ‘witch as monster’ theme. When it comes to witches as protagonists, the two longest running shows both had a domestic setting, harking back to the lighter tone of I Married a Witch and Bell, Book and Candle where the busy heroines try to juggle their domestic duties as wife (and sometimes mother) with witchcraft. What if, they seem to ask, the ‘angel in the home’ was really a witch? The wifely witches of Bewitched and Charmed are amongst the more ‘normal’ heroines in this book. This might sound odd given these characters do have special powers, but many of the ‘issues’ within the shows revolve around the home and the domestic sphere,

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balancing a career with family commitments. However a darker, bloodier kind of witchcraft has appeared, more recently, placing the question of power more obviously at the centre of the narrative. This chapter will look at four Cult TV series with witches as protagonists: Bewitched (ABC, 1964–72), Charmed (The WB, 1998–2006), Season 3 of the anthology series American Horror Story (FX, 2011–ongoing) entitled Coven (2013), and Netflix’s 2018 reboot of Sabrina the Teenage Witch, entitled Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. To say a drama, or series of dramas, is concerned with witches requiring scrutiny because they have been the site of a cultural struggle which is centuries old, demonstrating how fantasy and consensual reality can coil around one another: magic does not exist, and yet real people died because those in power thought it might. The academic scholarship around the history witches and witchcraft is large and growing, but the focus will be on three key moments which directly relate to the four Cult TV dramas under discussion: witches in early modern history; Margaret Murray’s erroneous characterization of witchcraft as vestigial paganism in Europe; and the second wave feminist recuperation of the image of the witch. In early modern history, a witch was a ‘female who practises maleficium, the art of doing harm by occult means. In league with the Devil and associated with wild and desolate places, she was thought to … possess the power of flight, so as to attend a coven of her fellows, where they fed on human flesh’ (Cotterell, 1979, p. 162). This is the image the witch hunters of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were familiar with, when thousands of people across Europe were accused of witchcraft, tortured, tried and often executed. Most, though not all, were women. The witch trials are a peculiarity of the early modern period, a cultural moment where the zeitgeist shifted towards a more rational and scientific worldview, and yet this did not mean that people immediately stopped believing in witchcraft. Rather than an immediate rejection of witchcraft, this period subjected previously taken-for-granted beliefs about witches to careful investigation and what makes studying the witch trials so complex is attempting to disentangle what might have been genuinely, if by modern standards erroneously, believed about the harm that witches could do, from ideas that might have been deliberately deployed by elites as a way of enacting power over women, peasants or any group deemed troublesome in local political feuds, including purely personal conflicts. The dramas discussed in this chapter only tangentially touch on the history of the witch trials across Europe and America, but it is interesting that they all reference the witch trials at the town of Salem, Massachusetts in 1692 as an ever-

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present, though only occasionally directly depicted, deep background to the characters. Season 7 of Bewitched features a series of episodes (Episodes 1–8) in which Samantha and her family have an extended stay in Salem, culminating in Samantha being sent back to seventeenth-century Salem and losing her powers, before being rescued by Darrin (Dick Sargent) and Endora (Agnes Moorehead) in a rare show of solidarity, only to have Darrin accused of witchcraft and leaving Samantha to argue against bigotry in favour of tolerance. Season 1 of Charmed features an episode, The Witch Is Back, where the progenitor of the Charmed sisters, Melinda Warren (Taylor Layton), summoned to help the sisters, reveals that she lived in Salem. She was outed as a witch by her lover and burned at the stake. In AHS: Coven, both the witches of Miss Robichaux’s academy and Marie Laveau’s coven are depicted as descended from the Salem witches, along with the claim by Marie Laveau that Tituba (historically the first person accused of witchcraft in Salem) was a practitioner of Voodoo, who gifted the white girls their power, although it has been argued that Tituba was not of African but rather of Native American origin (Breslaw, 1996). In Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, the goblin who becomes Sabrina’s familiar in the form of a cat is called Salem, but the town and the witch trials are also mentioned as a reason for keeping witches separate and secret from mortal humans. The second pertinent moment in the history of witches arises in the 1920s with the publication of an influential book by Margaret Murray (1863–1963) called The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921, republished in 1962). Murray began her career as an Egyptologist though she did not have any formal training in this nascent discipline, but rather was mentored by William Flinders Petrie, today thought of the as the founder of modern archaeology. However, in her later career Murray became infamous in academic circles as the purveyor of increasingly eccentric theories, particularly about witchcraft, which were based on faulty evidence and poor reasoning. As Simpson later put it, she was selective in her sources, which had the effect of producing a ‘cumulative distortion which she unscrupulously exploited’ (Simpson, 1994, p. 91). Murray argued that witches were the practitioners of an older pagan religion, concerned with fertility, who were persecuted by the Christian churches, thus creating a startling new figure: the benevolent witch. This was a bold and unfounded inversion of the historical evidence about witchcraft beliefs where the witch was always a malevolent figure bent on harm. This might have remained an unimportant footnote in the study of folklore but for two things. Firstly, in 1929 Murray wrote the entry on witchcraft for the Encyclopaedia Britannica which unproblematically set out her own interpretation

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of witchcraft as if it were the universally accepted one. It is astonishing in many ways that this remained unchallenged and in print until 1969, by which time one could argue that it was too late. The inaccurate theories in the Encyclopaedia Britannica had already been ‘accessible to journalists, film makers, popular novelists and thriller writers, who adopted them enthusiastically’ and which had become ‘so entrenched in popular culture that they will probably never be uprooted’ (Simpson, 1994, p. 89). Secondly, in the 1950s a man called Gerald Gardner (1884–1964) used Murray’s descriptions of rituals and festivals as a blueprint for setting up his own magical system and rituals which became the Wicca movement. It is notable that in the 1950s Murray and Gardner were both members of the Folklore Society, and that Murray herself (at the age of ninety-three) wrote an introduction to the second edition of Gardner’s book Witchcraft Today in 1955. Gardner is an interesting figure who had visited the notorious English occultist Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) in 1947 (Hutton, 2000, pp. 113ff) where he was given a charter to operate a lodge of the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), an occult order devoted to Tantric sex magic (Guiley, 1992, p. 413). When this proved an unsuccessful endeavour, Gardner reappeared with his own version of magic. Coming forward publically, conveniently just after the repeal of the 1735 law against witchcraft in England and Wales, Gardner described how he had been initiated into a coven of English witches from the New Forest area, in the 1930s, who, he said, were the last representatives of a pagan belief system. Gardner also introduced a twist on Murray’s version of supposedly pagan religion by introducing the Goddess as an important figure alongside the ‘Horned God’ that Murray had discussed. Gardner himself was clear that the God was to maintain a more dominant position than the Goddess, but his high priestess Doreen Valiente was not convinced of this and she rewrote Gardner’s Book of Shadows – a personal diary of Craft philosophy, rituals and spells – to remove the material borrowed from Crowley and to place the Goddess (as maiden, mother and crone) at the centre of Wiccan practice. Gardnerian ritual magic is the most widespread of neopagan practices today. Thus, it is worth emphasizing that the contemporary version of the ‘good witch’ appears in film and Cult TV is a twentieth-century invention or, at best, a misunderstanding of the historical material, but this brings us to the third element that informs the versions of witchcraft that appear in the Cult TV dramas in this chapter: the influence of feminism on the figure of the witch. Simpson, writing in 1996, noted that it seemed strange that until the 1970s ‘scholars had not given much thought to the well known fact that … most of the accused were women and that of these many were past the menopause’ (Simpson,

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1996, p. 8). In the late 1960s and early 1970s, in what came to be known as the second wave of feminism, as women libbers were making their points, the story of the historical persecution of women was suddenly more relevant than ever. Second wave feminists were fighting for a radical change of thinking around women and men, interested in consciousness raising, civil liberties for women and highlighting the dominance of patriarchy in society. One of the ways they did this was to question traditional depictions of women, such as the imagery of the evil witch. It was the second wavers who re-worked the witch into a vision of the unruly woman who did not live by patriarchal society’s rules and were unjustly punished for it. In Sisterhood is Powerful (1970) Robin Morgan made a claim for witches as the original resistance fighters against the oppression of women. In 1979 Mary Daly spoke of understanding the witch burnings as ‘embedded in contemporary androcratic Western-dominated society, on whose boundaries Hags and Crones are struggling to survive today’ (Daly, 1979, p. 180). Daly went on to suggest that witches were healers, counsellors, wise women and teachers, with qualities of independence, strength, wisdom and learning. The second wave feminists were trying to unearth a discourse which might lie outside patriarchally assigned gender characteristics for women, but in doing so owed rather more to Murray and Gardner’s version of witchcraft than to historical record where the witch is always an evil influence. Arguing that they were healers or wise women is an intuitive leap rather than a matter of historical record. Wicca became a distinct and enduring part of the broader feminist movement particularly in America and Canada, where writers like Starhawk and Zsuzsanna Budapest developed a woman-centred spirituality movement around Wiccan practices based on sources from Gardner and Valiente, or that of Alex Sanders, who trained with Gardner before setting up his own version, called Alexandrian witchcraft, in the 1960s. The second wave feminists wanted to (re)claim the witch as a powerful and wise woman unfettered by patriarchal assumptions about what women could or should be. The image of the crone, the old woman past menopause, most reviled by a patriarchy obsessed with women’s sexual attractiveness and availability, was particularly ripe for feminist reconsideration: the crone had knowledge and experience, was seen as powerful and dangerous, and this was mapped onto the idea of the witch. This feminist version of the witch saw her as being misunderstood in history, horribly persecuted by patriarchy but now ready to step into her rightful place of power. However, despite the feminist claims of the shows, this is still not the witch of romcom and sit com, popular as they were. In fact, the crone is almost entirely

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absent, not just amongst witch protagonists, but from the world of Cult TV heroines altogether. The lack of older and old women is what might be termed a ‘structuring absence’. Old women on television, as Douglas pointed out, were presented as grotesque ‘battle axes, villainesses, shrews and over-the-hill whores of popular culture – with their aging faces and sagging, protruding bodies, were ostracised, pitied, and often destroyed in movies and TV shows because they had moved outside the norms of femininity’ (Douglas, 1994, p. 132), and this is true of the Cult TV dramas here, in which the powerful old woman is either absent, a spectral presence with little direct power, a duplicitous figure who cannot be trusted or even a grotesque monster who must be overcome by the pretty young heroines. In fact, the fate of old women in all Cult TV drama, if present at all, is rarely a happy one. In Charmed, the mother of the sisters is long dead, and their grandmother has brought them up, but at the start of the drama, she too is dead. Although mother, grandmother and ancestor Melinda all reappear at times with advice for the sisters, they remain a ghostly presence in all senses. The old women in AHS: Coven begin as the most powerful characters. Fiona Goode (Jessica Lange) is the current Supreme (leader) of the New Orleans coven, but she is a sick selfish old woman, desperately clinging onto power, ‘haunted by her lost youth and the quest to retain her supremacy’ (Vink, 2014, p. 149); Marie Laveau (Angela Bassett) is the leader of the voodoo practitioners and seemingly immortal but fatally embittered by the feud with Fiona’s coven and the murder of her lover by Delphine LaLaurie (Kathy Bates). By the end of the series, these powerful old women are not just dead, but punished for all eternity in an ongoing hell of their own making, while the young, beautiful Cordelia (Sarah Paulson) ascends to become the new Supreme. In Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, the justturning-sixteen Sabrina (Kiernan Shipka) is manipulated and lied to by her two aunts, who brought her up, one of whom, Zelda (Miranda Otto), is particularly punished by the Witches Council by the reinstatement of her mortality and the signs of ageing it brings. Also in Sabrina’s world is Miss Wardwell (Michelle Gomez), a trusted teacher who dispenses advice but who is actually possessed by a demon, Madam Satan, intent on her own plot for power. From the start, Sabrina is aware of the men such as Father Blackwood (Richard Coyle) who try to control her, but for a long time she is unaware of the duplicity of the older women. It is a trope repeated in Jessica Jones, where Jessica’s mother Alisa, her adopted mother Dorothy Walker and her sometime employer Hogarth, all from an older generation, cannot be relied upon as allies. Old women, it seems, are not to be trusted, only obsessed with their own power or vanishing youth.

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In some ways it is surprising that the oldest show has the least vengeful approach to its old woman. In Bewitched Endora (Agnes Moorehead) is Samantha’s mother, who does not approve of her daughter’s ‘mixed marriage’. She is quite a caricature, with her ‘overly bouffant, bright red hairdos, two-inchlong false eyelashes, and thick eyeliner that shot up at a forty-five-degree angle to her eyes, Endora made gestures to femininity that were exaggerated, like a Mardi Gras mask’ (Douglas, 1994, p. 132). But, at least Endora is directly present within the drama and in some ways (at least to post second wave feminist viewers) a breath of fresh air. As Douglas goes on to say (and is worth quoting in full): She was blunt, honest, catty and self indulgent, and she did not waste her time trying to soothe others’ feelings or placate men the way Samantha did. She was a caricature of the meddling, hard-edged mother-in-law girls were supposed to cast themselves against. But as played by Agnes Moorehead, Endora also had an arch sophistication and a biting tongue that enabled her to get away with – and enjoy – her assaults on arbitrary male authority especially when it was imposed on her daughter … Endora got to say what many women wished they could say, and her complete indifference to the approval of men was a joy and relief to watch, even as we knew we did not want to be like her. (Douglas, 1994, p. 132)

Endora was vocal, demonstrated autonomy at all times, and was far from the simpering wife or doormat mother that Samantha came perilously close to at times. She could be mischievous but she remained loyal to her daughter Samantha, if not to Darrin her husband. By way of contrast, the protagonists of the shows are more domesticated, palatable to patriarchy, tidy, pretty and using their powers to benefit (patriarchal) society. Bewitched and Charmed were positioned as primetime shows on a mainstream network and are at heart socially conservative. Samantha and the Halliwell sisters, like Cordelia and Sabrina, are groomed to perfection, with permanently glossy hair, accessorised, coordinated and sanitized. Their ‘dilemmas’ do not extend, for example, to their appearance, and if these witches are to be associated with feminism at all, then it is of a postfeminist sort, one thoroughly embedded within consumer capitalism, rather than the more radical second wave. They are far from the indigestible crone of the second wave. Witchcraft as popularly understood today is an invention of the twentieth century. It is an amalgam, a mash up, of a range of elements, born out of inaccurate scholarship, wishful thinking and perhaps, in Gardner’s case, a desire for fame, but spreading because in a time of rising feminism and concern about the environment it seemed to offer a woman-centred practice and a celebration of the natural world. This version of witchcraft was not dogmatic; it lacked

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central authority and left a powerful place for individual creativity. As Guiley pointed out, ‘individualism and eclecticism are prized among Witches, who feel free to develop and change their rituals to suit their own ever-changing needs’ (Guiley, 1992, p. 416) which begins to sound like a practice of active imagination in itself, and what is truly surprising here is that Cult TV has not been more imaginative in capturing that inventiveness. The analysis of these shows will pay particular attention to the domestic space within which much of the drama plays out: Samantha’s suburban home; the Halliwell’s manor; the school in AHS: Coven which forms a substitute home for the disparate group of pupils and staff; and the Spellman family home in Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. The domestic space is worth examining because the home has always been a place where local autonomy has been practised by women, but here it also throws into focus the ambivalent attitude to personal power shown by the witches in these dramas. The witches have magical power, but they must often exercise it in secret from their domestic positions. Finally, this chapter will look at how female solidarity via the role of the coven is represented, because regardless of its historical veracity, the coven can be read as a female power grouping, though patriarchal society works to avert collision by making women want to alienate their power, to relinquish their agency, often leaving these witches in a state of denial.

Bewitched (ABC, 1964–72) In 1964, Time magazine published an article about a new sitcom called Bewitched. It declared that Many a man is convinced that a witch lives under his roof. With the arrival of the present TV season, many another is probably wishing that he could exchange his incumbent hag for Elizabeth Montgomery. Pretty and blonde with a turnedup nose, she hardly suggests cauldrons full of rat guts and eels, but she plays a thoroughbred sorceress married to an advertising executive on ABC’s Bewitched. (Time Magazine, 1964)

An eyebrow-raising point of view indeed for a contemporary reader but a timely reminder that the origins of Bewitched lay before the rise of second wave feminism, and its reclamation of the image of the crone or hag. The sitcom in fact appeared only a year after the publication of Betty Friedan’s influential book The Feminine Mystique, which is seen by many as the call to arms that galvanized the second wave. The book’s opening chapter described the image

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of the suburban American housewife ‘freed by science and labour-saving appliances from the drudgery, the dangers of childbirth, educated and concerned only about her husband, her children, her home. She had found true feminine fulfilment’ (Friedan, 1963, p. 18). And yet, as Friedan goes on to articulate, she was also suffering an acute dissatisfaction with life and the conclusion to the opening chapter stated ‘We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: “I want something more than my husband and my children and my home”’ (Friedan, 1963, p. 32). Samantha Stephens, witch turned housewife, appeared on TV screens at the perfect moment, expressing the conflict increasingly consciously felt by women at the time. Bewitched followed the fortunes of Samantha (the ‘thoroughbred sorceress’ of Time’s article) who admits to her husband on the first night of their honeymoon that she is in fact a witch. After some consideration, Darrin accepts her background but wants her to be a regular housewife and not to practise witchcraft, which in the show was indicated by a wiggle of her nose. Samantha agrees, but is quickly tested as the realities of suburban living kick in. The show revolved around Samantha’s illicit use of magic and the inevitably ensuing mayhem before Samantha’s tact, diplomacy, cunning (and often magic) were able to put things right once more. As was the norm at the time, the show does not permit much in the way of narrative development, and other than the gradual addition of two children, the Stephens are in the same situation at the end of the final episode as they were at the beginning. Bewitched is the longest-running witch series in this chapter, lasting for eight seasons and an impressive 254 episodes in all, beginning in black and white before moving to colour in 1966, although some of the DVD releases colourized the original black and white episodes. The show was popular and was the network’s (ABC) longest-running and highest rated sitcom during the years it was on the air and their number one show in its first season. It was shown at 9.00 pm in the evening on a Thursday just before the racy soap opera Peyton Place, although latterly it was moved around and never found the perfect spot again. There was an attempted spin-off series Tabitha in 1977, featuring Samantha’s now grown-up daughter, but it only lasted for eleven episodes before being cancelled. A loosely related film version Bewitched (2005, Nora Ephron) starring Nicole Kidman was more successful, though no sequels ensued. Sony Pictures Television, which owns the rights to the show, were reported to be considering a sit com reboot where an African-American Samantha marries a mortal white man (Otterson, 2019), but are now are re-examining movie options for the property.

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The suburban and domestic setting for the show was key. Samantha was ‘living the dream’ in perfectly modern suburbia, with a lovely house and garden, a car and a husband with a great job and prospects. It was, as Friedan had articulated, surely what every housewife and housewife-to-be dreamed of, and yet, for Samantha, her outside world of witches, usually in the form of her mother, had a way of re-inserting itself. The action centred around the Stephens family home, with its modern open plan living room and dining room, a feature staircase in the centre, patio doors to the garden, a well-stocked kitchen, and all mod cons, including a large television. It was classic mid-century interior design, on-trend for the period in which it was broadcast, with clean lines, minimal ornamentation and uncluttered surfaces. Open floor plans, with lots of circulating space and streamlined, lowprofile sofas made for an airy space. It also featured juxtapositions of different materials, such as the feature brick wall around the fireplace, framed either side by wooden built in bookcases. The colour palette (after the move from black and white) were harvest tones of olive greens, orange, cocoa and ochre. It was modern and chic, just like Samantha herself, where the design clearly signals to the audience that Samantha aspires to the same modern lifestyle as any modern wife. In this way, the design supports the plot and character of the show, but it also establishes the motive of the show’s protagonist. Samantha has chosen the domestic life and defends it against all comers. The consistent use of the Stephens’s home as the setting also makes the magical interventions more obviously out of place when they appear. For example, in George the Warlock (1.30), where Darrin is turned into a penguin, the appearance of the bird waddling across the living room carpet reinforces through the design the juxtaposition of ‘normality’ with the magical craziness of Samantha’s ‘other’ world. Or in Twitch or Treat (3.7) when Samantha calls upon Endora, and she appears, sitting in a tree in the garden, or in Samantha’s Power Failure (5.24) where a tiny Uncle Arthur (Paul Lynde) pops up from the toaster. Indeed, Endora’s usual bold green and purple robes and wild red hair never fit into the muddier colour scheme of the living room. However, Samantha has given up her life of magical power and privilege to marry the mortal Darrin and learn how to cook and clean the hard way, and is always at pains to hide these magical slips and restore the integrity of their domestic bliss, as demonstrated in the always (in the end) clean and tidy internal decor. The two characters who most regularly interrupt Samantha’s domestic existence are her mother, Endora, and her cousin Serena (also played by Elizabeth Montgomery) who encourage, cajole, trick and even force her into

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using her powers. They represent the magical side of life to Darrin’s domestic drudgery, but it is interesting that they are also female characters who do not fit into domestic roles. As already noted above, Endora, an old woman, seems a genuinely rebellious figure who does not want her daughter stuck in domestic obscurity, leading one writer to suggest that Endora ‘is probably one of the most radical feminist characters to appear in a sitcom. She not only mocks Darrin at every opportunity but disdains all the cherished trappings of the American Dream to which her daughter aspires – marriage, children, suburban house, security – all of it’ (Kenton, 2016, p. 78). Endora was the stereotype of the meddling mother-in-law and yet she was also sophisticated and daring in a way that the more conventional and conciliatory Samantha was not, and many commentators express an often slightly grudging admiration for Endora, although, as noted above, Douglas (1994), who also writes with admiration of Endora’s scathing wit, points out that her appearance is grotesquely exaggerated in comparison to the lovely Samantha. Endora might speak of liberation, she argues, but you wouldn’t want to be her: an example where mise en scène can undermine otherwise potentially feminist messages. The movie version of Bewitched (Nora Ephron, 2005) replaced Endora as the reluctant mother-in-law with Nigel (Michael Caine) the reluctant father-in-law who begs his daughter not to give up witchcraft, but it is also worth noting that Nigel is not an exaggerated grotesque, but a dapper older gentleman complete with smart jacket and cravat. Also interrupting Samantha’s domestic bliss was Serena, Sam’s brunette lookalike cousin, who called into question the old adage that ‘blondes have more fun’. She was a ‘wacky, wild, swinging single who functioned as hyperbolic depictions of nondomestic roles for women’ (Spigel, 2001, p. 129) and who often confronted Sam by criticizing her boring lifestyle. She represented a version of femininity apparently unfettered by patriarchal concerns, a hippy who challenged her magical world by engaging with mortals and more like her ‘square’ cousin Samantha than either character would have admitted. The storylines with Serena, such as Twitch or Treat (3.7), usually featured Serena standing in for Samantha to fool Darrin for short periods of time. From today’s perspective Samantha can be difficult to understand. She is portrayed as eminently likeable and never seems to lose her temper for long. She has knowledge and power, but chooses not to use it. In Sam in the Moon (3.17), for instance, she demonstrates great knowledge about the Moon and the space race, better than NASA, but then declared that ‘I am more interested in getting the

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refrigerator straightened out, the oven scrubbed, the attic cleaned and the rugs vacuumed’. In Long Live the Queen (4.1) Sam is chosen to replace the abdicating Queen of the witches (who is called Tituba in another nod to the historical Salem witch trials). Samantha is at first flattered by this but then tries to explain ‘I can’t be queen. I’m married to a mortal and I have a child and a house to take care of ’. Nonetheless because she is one of a few witches selected a birth for the role, she must serve and she is crowned Queen in front of the ‘universal coven’, after promising Darrin that she will deal with business only after midnight. Of course, this plan falls apart almost immediately when petitioners begin arriving at their house, waking up Darrin up, and then accidentally gate crashing an important business meeting. An angry Darrin announces ‘You’ve been Queen for a day. That’s enough!’ and then storms out of the house. However, after drowning his sorrows and meeting a man who has not been home for a year and whose child no longer recognizes him, Darrin decides that maybe he can accept Sam’s new status after all, especially as it turns out she must serve only for a year (see Figure 5). And in true sitcom fashion that is the end of the matter. In Samantha’s

Figure 5  Samantha (Elizabeth Montgomery) welcomes back Darrin (Dick York) much to Endora’s (Agnes Moorehead) disappointment. Bewitched, Long Live the Queen (4.1).

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Power Failure (5.25) Sam avows loudly to her mother once more that she will not give up her marriage to Darrin no matter what the Witches Council says, and in a rumble of thunder, they strip her of her powers. In this instance, they are disembodied, manifesting through weather – thunder, wind, clouds blowing across the sky. Samantha is unrepentant and refuses to back down, saying they are risking their own authority by punishing her for being different. Endora does her best to get Sam to change her mind. However, over dinner it becomes clear that their powers have been restored and once again that is the end of the matter, because the episode is really centred around the silliness of Serena and Uncle Arthur in trying to fit in to mortal life for a time. The contradiction of mortal vs witch and domestic vs wilder femininity is at the heart of Bewitched and the source of much of its pleasures and frustrations for generations of viewers. Samantha had access to a magical realm of possibility and seemingly effortless pleasures. She had personal powers, but her husband insists that she give it up and throws tantrums when she does not comply. The confusing thing is that Samantha happily agrees to Darrin’s strictures and never seriously tries to change his mind, but at the same time constantly ignores his wishes, by continuing to practise magic behind his back. This conflict is never resolved in the show, which is perhaps unsurprising given the traditional sitcom setup, and Samantha herself never admits any personal cost to managing these contrary demands or expresses doubts about her situation. Instead she seems to juggle it all with good humour, charm, common sense, diplomacy and, when all else failed, a twitch of her magical nose. The character of Samantha herself stitches together the contradictions, though she does not resolve them, and the pull of both worlds remains in conflict within both the narrative and the mise en scène. Samantha’s lack of conflict about her choices appears to be in marked contrast to the Halliwell sisters in Charmed who constantly complain about the choices they are forced to make. Although broadcast long before the internet, Bewitched remains in the public consciousness due to its regular syndication, though fan activity is more muted than lively. Fanlore.org reports a variety of online communities and mailing lists, some defunct, with Endora memes the most active. The design of the show has also remained popular with the house and its interior designs still widespread on sites like Pinterest, and Samantha’s outfits also featuring on Pinterest (Salvato, no date) and websites (James, 2018), especially following the success of Mad Men (AMC, 2007–15) which raised the profile of midcentury design. There is a wiki (Bewitched on Wikia.com, no date), though

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it is rather sparsely populated, and several websites, such as Harpiesbizarre. com which is named after a witches magazine that appeared as a prop in the show. The imaginative play with Bewitched’s suburban paradise seems to have died down. Another long-running witch-related show did not come along not for another twenty-six years, but Charmed did play homage to Bewitched in a playful intertextual episode called Lost and Bound (4.12) where one of the Halliwell sisters, Phoebe, is engaged but worrying about losing her identity. Her grandmother’s ring transforms her into a Samantha Stephens character obsessed with feeding people and knitting, as well as screaming when attacked by a demon, rather than taking care of herself as was more usually the case (see Figure 6). Although it takes them a while to notice, both her fiancé and her sisters are perturbed by this version of Phoebe, especially when she starts to turn black and white. However, once the ring is removed, Phoebe returns to her usual self and the engaged pair agree that times have changed and ‘sitting and knitting’ is not Phoebe’s married destiny. Charmed certainly takes a dim view of Samantha’s domestic servitude, but misses all the ways in which she did disobey her husband to exercise her powers.

Figure 6  Phoebe (Alyssa Milano) takes Piper’s place in the kitchen at the Halliwell Manor while under the influence of a spell. Charmed, Lost and Bound (4.12).

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Charmed (The WB, 1998–2006) Charmed tells the story of the Halliwell sisters – Prue (Shannen Doherty, Seasons 1–3), Piper (Holly Marie Combs), Phoebe (Alyssa Milano) and later Paige (Rose McGowan, Seasons 4–8) – who are the Charmed Ones, young women who inherit magical powers that enable them to battle demons and warlocks to protect the innocent. Over eight seasons and 178 episodes, the sisters juggled their magical responsibilities alongside career and romantic aspirations, as well as domestic duties, to become the longest-running TV series featuring all female leads (Gallagher, Ruditis & Ungerleider, 2006, p. 282). The show was the creation of Spelling Television, a production company whose origins date back to 1966, and which had developed a significant track record in creating television which Aaron Spelling himself called ‘mind candy’ (Gallagher, Ruditis & Ungerleider, 2006, p. 282), including shows with a younger audience such as Beverley Hills 90210 (Fox, 1990–2000). The company was approached by developing US station The WB to create something for the new channel which had launched in 1995 but was still struggling to find its audience and consolidate its brand. Constance M. Burge was hired to develop a series for Spelling, and the idea that she eventually pitched involved ‘sisters who happened to be witches, rather than witches who happened to be sisters’ (Gallagher, Ruditis & Ungerleider, 2006, p. 282). Burge served as executive producer alongside Brad Kern who went on to act as showrunner and Charmed was launched in 1998. Charmed formed a core part of a 1990s renaissance in programming for teenagers, where the commercial potential of the younger audience segment was once more being recognized, and by 2000, partly through its adoption of quality, hour-long, ensemble cast-based drama, The WB had become firmly established as ‘the network of choice for the youth/teen audience’ (Wee, 2008, p. 44). Initially Variety did not think Charmed stacked up very well against Bewitched and described it as ‘spectacularly inoffensive’ but did concede that ‘some preteens may find it a pretty riveting way to kill an hour’ (Richmond, 1998). Two days later once the audience figures were in, however, it was clear that the show, in conjunction with the new season debut of the already-established Dawson’s Creek (The WB, 1998–2003), had ‘conjured up WB records for best premiere rating ever in homes’ (Bierbaum, 1998) scoring particularly well with women and giving The WB a rare overall fourth place finish (behind the big networks, ABC, NBC and CBS), thus beating its closest rivals at the time UPN and Fox.

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Charmed and The WB were clearly a match made in heaven and the winning result of a clear business strategy of focusing on niche, younger audiences. The sisters were attractive, feisty and active, and the fantasy scenario allowed the heroines to explore an ostensible agenda of empowerment and (the contested term) ‘girl power’ that was current in the late 1990s. Charmed was a show riding the crest of a new feminist wave. Young women, who were generationally daughters of the second wavers, sought out a less activist version of empowerment and focused instead on individual choice and personal freedoms, and the book Investigating Charmed (2007) featured several chapters, including my own, exploring the complexity of the versions of femininity and feminism that appeared within the show, trying to disentangle the conventional from the subversive and recognizing that the show was ‘both a text of compliance and a text of resistance’ (Carroll in Beeler & Beeler, 2007, p. 53), much as Bewitched had been three decades earlier. For example, the issue of personal style becomes particularly acute when considering the show’s feminist credentials. As noted in Part 1, the excessiveness of the audiovisual text, with its braids of signification, means that there are always number of meanings being put forward. The actions of the Charmed Ones may be brave and bold within the dramatic narrative. The sisters may stand forth and proclaim their independence, fight for their place and defend their men, but their appearance can simultaneously undermine that message. As will be discussed in more detail in the following chapter, the heroines’ perfectly groomed, sexually appealing bodies are presented as conventionally beautiful and unproblematic, with no hint as to how such perfection is achieved. The Halliwell sisters always have good hair, perfect nails, are attired in the latest fashions, with matching accessories, but as well documented by Naomi Wolf ’s polemic The Beauty Myth (1990), itself a classic of third wave feminism, such bodies and looks are not created by accident or for free. This creates a tension within the representation of the independent heroine and the way such a heroic woman is expected to look, which can rapidly mutate into ‘in order to be a heroine, one must one look a certain way’. As I discussed in my own chapter about power and gender in the show, this emphasis on appearance and shopping entangles the feminist discourse problematically with that of consumer capitalism: Charmed is a marketing opportunity that invokes a version of feminism … that is compatible with consumer capitalism, for the show does not just sell goods, it also sells symbols and ideas. Thus Charmed is a marketing vehicle, not just for itself, but for Wicca, and its technologies of the self, all of which sit very well with

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The sisters seem to have an equivocal relationship with their own power, with the problem being that ‘the instant the sisters acquire their magical powers (for “powers” read “power”) they do not want it’ (Miller in Beeler & Beeler, 2007, p. 73). Throughout all eight seasons, the sisters remain unsure about their priorities, a dichotomy most often expressed by Piper. As early as I’ve Got You under My Skin (1.2) she says: Our whole lives we’ve been like everybody else – rushing off to work, going out on bad dates, buying shoes then suddenly you wake up one day and everything is different. We’re witches now. And I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing … I just want to be normal again, as messed up as that was. That too much to ask for?

It is a reasonable question in the context of the episode because Piper’s reward for coming into power is the realization that her boyfriend wants to kill her as it turns out that Jeremy (Eric Scott Woods) is a warlock who wants to murder her and take her power. In a more complex fashion, this is also what Cole (Julian McMahon) AKA the Source of All Evil wants from Phoebe in a long running storyline in Seasons 3–5. Power seems to come between the sisters and a happy love life. It seems as if a simple equation is at work – having power equals not having a boyfriend, husband or father or children. Being ‘normal’ on the other hand seems to mean not having power, but having access to men, and the show places a great deal of importance upon having a man and keeping your ‘heart open to love’ (to the extent that an actual Cupid is sent to keep Phoebe looking for love in Season 8). For example, in Season 2 Prue is shown a future in which she is exceptionally successful in the business world, but does not have a husband or children. This is instrumental in her decision to leave her highflying job because career success on top of magical duties means no family. In Season 8, Phoebe becomes obsessed with her desire to have a child, dashing off for a weekend with current paramour Dex Lawson (Jason Lewis) because she’s ovulating: again family and work do not appear to mix. Paige, meantime, struggles to balance work and magic – quitting her job, as Prue had done before her, as she ‘strives to achieve the balance she knows a superwitch can attain – love, family, friends and a satisfying career’ (Gallagher & Ruditis, 2004, p. 6) – probably in that order. Even their grandmother (who has had more than her

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fair share of husbands) admits that this is a problem for Halliwell women. ‘The Charmed Ones are destined for greatness’, she says in Magic Hour (3.2), ‘but that fact doesn’t keep a girl warm on a cold winter’s night’. It is also worth noting that (although overall relatively few in number) a high percentage of the female demons and monsters who attack the sisters have become monstrous because they were crossed in love, such as the wendigo who ate her lover’s heart; the siren who was burned for having affairs with married men; or the ghostly lover with unfinished business. To lack love, or to have love taken away, in terms of the show’s narrative, seems to render a woman monstrous, and it is not surprising, therefore, that the three surviving sisters are desperate for love and rewarded with a conventionally happy ending. However because power and conventional love do no mix terribly well, the men who ‘get the girls’ are also far from ordinary. Piper remains married to Leo, the (ex)angel. Phoebe has landed Coop (Victor Webster), one of the Cupids, after her long relationship with the Source of all Evil comes to an end, and Paige, the least witchy of the trio, being part Whitelighter, is the only one marrying a mortal, Henry (Ivan Sergei). All the sisters already have children or are promised them in a future vision. The happy ending is signalled in happy domesticity. So far Charmed seems to be ‘caught in the mechanisms of repression of patriarchal power. They are attacked by male demons and warlocks who want their power, they are manipulated by the Elders, and shown cautionary tales of monstrous women who have been crossed in love’ (Miller in Beeler & Beeler, 2007, p. 76) and their happy ending is a patriarchally sanctioned one with all the sisters safely coupled up. However there are also spaces of resistance within the text, albeit in a more coded fashion. The Charmed Ones are victims of a large number of attacks by male demons and warlocks. In fact, with the exception of Season 6, between 70 per cent and 75 per cent of the various demons, warlocks, beasts, creatures and so on which attack the Charmed Ones and seek to gain their power are male. In the remaining 25 per cent of episodes, around 14 per cent of attacks were from female demons, witches or other magical creatures and the remaining 11 per cent were either gender neutral beings; the Charmed Ones were the source of the attack itself or were dealing with personal problems. The powerful sisters are targets, but they do resist. They actively fight back and they overcome the threats. They also resist the attempts of the Elders to control them. The Elders (senior Whitelighters or angels) are supposed to guide and protect the Charmed Ones but they are paternalistic to say the least. A key episode Wicca Envy (1.10), for example, undercuts the source of the Charmed Ones’ power and their appearance

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of agency early on. The sisters have been blackmailed into giving up their powers, but Leo (Brian Krause), the Whitelighter assigned as their guide, simply (and secretly) waves his hands and restores their magic to them, presumably at the behest of the still hidden Elders. Thus, in a sense, their powers are no longer emanating from Melinda Warren, their ancestor, but from Leo and the Elders. In Morality Bites (2.2) the sisters are sent into the future, but as Leo tells them after they return, ‘you three were given a glimpse of your future to learn a valuable lesson. And I’m glad that you learnt it too because I know they wouldn’t have brought you back if you hadn’t’. In Magic Hour (3.2) the Elders remove Leo at the moment he is about to marry Piper and it is not until she ‘learns her lesson’ (that innocents must come first) is he restored. The Elders continue to interfere (or guide) in this fashion even after Season 5, when most of them are killed. However, at the same time, the Charmed Ones do defy the Elders. For example, in Blinded by the Whitelighter (3.11) another Whitelighter, Natalie (Audrey Wasilewski), is put in charge of the sisters but, when Natalie is killed, the Charmed Ones only save the day because they break the rules and have Leo orb (teleport) them ‘upstairs’ to the Elders and vanquish the warlock. Carroll argues that the rule breaking of the Charmed Ones is the result of a different ethical system. They use the traits of caring and nurturing as their guiding moral voice – an ethic of care, as she calls it – which is focused on reducing suffering and harm to real people, and is less concerned with justice or vengeance (Carroll, 2007, p. 59). The Elders are a moral voice based on abstract principles and authority, and the Charmed Ones often see this as a difficulty to be overcome where the rules must be challenged in order to save a particular individual. Indeed, Carroll argues that this is a feminine ethical system, part and parcel of their wider feminine and perhaps even feminist context. The Charmed Ones are also part of a long matriarchal line of women with power. They were brought up by their mother and grandmother, with a largely absent father. It is the ghost of their grandmother Penny Halliwell (Jennifer Rhodes) who officiates the marriage or ‘hand fasting’ of Piper and Leo, and as Wolfe points out, it is ‘clear that Leo is marrying into the Halliwell family and not the other way around’ (Wolfe in Beeler & Beeler, 2007, p. 94). In Season 5, when Penny reappears to perform a Wiccan version of a baptism, it is revealed that the son of Leo and Piper is to be called Wyatt Halliwell, which is both their surnames, as Penny calls upon the ‘matriarchs of the Halliwell line’ to bless the child. However as noted, along with the other shows discussed in this chapter, the older generation of women is problematic. Patty Halliwell (Finola Hughes), the

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girls’ mother, died when the girls were young – Phoebe has hardly any memory of her and Paige has none at all. Penny (Grams) Halliwell brought the girls up single handedly, apparently keeping their father at bay. These older women of Charmed are not grotesque in appearance like Endora, nor hell bent on maintaining their own power, as is the case with AHS: Coven, and it is also true that they do not actively mislead the sisters, as Sabrina’s older female guardians do, although the arrival of a fourth sister Paige was something of a surprise. However, all the older women, much mentioned and referred to, are, at best, temporary ghostly presences, with limited power to influence events. The day-to-day guidance (one might say supervision) is provided by Leo and the Whitelighters. Instead, the loyalty of the sisterhood and female community seems to have greater force horizontally amongst young and attractive peers, rather than being intergenerational. The power of the Charmed Ones is at its strongest when all of the sisters are together: the Power of Three, as the show dubs it, but their bond is over and above simply a magical one. The horizontal loyalties between the sisters are strong. Although each may temporarily leave, only death separates one sister permanently from the others. They relish one another’s successes, cherish Piper’s children and (with the exception of Paige’s entirely warranted suspicion of Cole) support each other in the choices that they make. Despite their complaints about fighting demons, they also often seem to rejoice when they share in hand-tohand combat. When confronted with the choice between an important mission that threatens many and saving the life of a sister, between honour and loyalty, loyalty to a sister always triumphs in the end. Their house is the site and the symbol of their community, a source of strength and protection. The Halliwell Manor, as they refer to it, is the family home of several generations. They own it, and it is both a refuge and fortress, being built on a Nexus, a site of great power equidistant from five mystical elements of fire, earth, water, metal and wood (which is quite different from the traditional four elements of earth, water, fire and air). As well as the Nexus, it is where their Book of Shadows resides, which is both a record of their family history and source of their spells. The importance of the Halliwell Manor is demonstrated in regular ‘external shots of the house that provides a communal living space for the three sisters [which] are, perhaps, the most persistent images of the entire series’ (Beeler in Beeler & Beeler, 2007, p. 138). The exterior of the house itself is quite a well-known real world Victorian house known as the Innes House built in 1887 for city councilman Daniel Innes. It is in fact in the Angelino Heights district of Los Angeles and not San Francisco where the drama is set, but the architectural style is not dissimilar

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to the Castro District of San Francisco. Both areas feature architecture in the Eastlake style, a style named after British architect Charles Eastlake who espoused a household design reform movement in the late nineteenth century, related to the Arts and Crafts movement in England, but Eastlake’s book became very popular in the United States. The interiors of the Halliwell Manor are all sets, but the decoration continues to evoke the past and is quite traditional in tone, referencing the colonial period rather than any modernist or pop culture eras. The contemporary tastes of their grandmother or mother do not seem to have left any mark on the house, although the walls are decorated with pictures of the sisters’ relatives and ancestors. Thus, the longevity of the matrilineal line is promoted, albeit in a rather vague fashion, through the architecture and design of the Halliwell Manor. Although the show is not as domestically focused as Bewitched, the home is still the centre of the emotional life of the sisters, where sometimes getting the chores done is a bone of contention as in The Power of Two (1.20) where Phoebe complains ‘not even married and already I’m a housewife’ when given a long list of chores by her sisters. However, Piper Halliwell is the sister most associated with the house and with the kitchen at its centre. At first Piper is the middle sister, a buffer between the rebellious youngest Phoebe and the serious eldest, Prue, but after Prue’s death in All Hell Breaks Loose (3.22) and the appearance of Paige, Piper becomes the oldest sister and in turn the most grown up. She marries Leo in Season 3 and becomes a mother in Season 5. In the meantime, she manages a nightclub and dreams of becoming a chef. It is perhaps no wonder then that she is seen more often than the other sisters in the kitchen, which is a warm white chocolate colour with traditional cabinets though all mod cons, including a microwave. But none of the sisters really value domestic work and are more concerned to achieve something in the public sphere. In fact, worthwhile jobs are an issue for all four of the sisters. They juggle demon hunting and protection of the innocent with developing their magical powers and maintaining relationships with each other and various men, and yet all still strive for career achievement. Once again ‘compliance’ and ‘resistance’ are simultaneously present in the text. The sisters are under attack from male creatures, but have the power to resist and fight back. Their power stems from a matrilineal family, but the largely male Elders sometimes take their power away. Their foremothers are present within the story, but they are ghosts and thus relatively powerless. Their home is an important touchstone, and yet none of them value domestic labour. And so on. This back and forth on female power points to the particular historical

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moment that the show aired, when postfeminism was supplanting the angrier activist second wave, and the magic itself lies somewhere between the invented Wicca of Gardner and the reclamation of the witch figure by second wave feminism, though the witches of Charmed are far from the indigestible, postmenopausal woman of Mary Daly. Charmed talks a good game, but the power on offer is definitely a young and attractive girl power, not the more troubling and angrier woman power. The Charmed fandom remains active, even though the show came off the air in 2006. The most popular Charmed wiki on Fandom.com (there are several) remains active with updates and tweaks to the 5,000 plus pages related to the series. Fan fiction too remains lively. Fanfiction.net records nearly 12,000 Charmed related entries, with continuations of Chris Halliwell’s story proving particularly popular. Chris (Drew Fuller) is the son of Piper and Leo, who first appears at the end of Season 5, time travelling back to warn his family of his brother Wyatt’s power and potential for evil. Fanlore.org contains a lot of crossover fan fiction with the world of Harry Potter in particular, perhaps because of Season 6’s addition of Magic School, run by the Elders. The shipper or slash fiction elements explore fairly conventional pairings such as Piper and Leo, but stories about Phoebe and Cole far outnumber stories about Phoebe and Coop: it seems the idea of being married to the Source of all Evil is more interesting to fans than being married to a Cupid. The colonial interior design style of the show and the Halliwell Manor itself are also still regular posts on Pinterest, alongside crafting suggestions and patterns for patchwork for example, as well as fashion and beauty related to the series. Deviantart.com offers several hundred thousand Charmed-related fan-produced images, which are still being added to. The fans’ active imagination seems to have been activated by several elements of the show, which they amplified via their playful activities: the idea of having power to do good, to save innocents, while being part of a sisterhood (albeit a young and attractive sisterhood with only ghostly female forebears), is certainly a feature, and there are stories devoted to the experience of getting their powers. The fans also explored the male figures in the series, some look closer at the relationship between brothers Chris and Wyatt, but magical romantic relationships dominate. Phoebe’s long association with Cole, for example, might be seen as a fantasy rendering of the experience of many young women in a patriarchal society: initially fascinating and attractive, Cole is gradually revealed to be a controlling, negative figure whom Phoebe must resist and escape from in order to become a fully autonomous character once again.

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In Autumn 2018, The CW (formed when former competitors The WB and UPN joined forces in 2006) premiered a reboot of Charmed, set in Michigan this time with Afro-Latina Macy (Madeleine Mantock) and Latina Mel (Melonie Diaz) and Maggie (Sarah Jeffery) who discover they are The Charmed Ones. The cast is more racially diverse and the middle sister is a lesbian. The CW described it as ‘fierce, funny, feminist’ (Hibberd, 2018), a turn of phrase which angered some of the original cast, who responded on Twitter saying ‘Guess we forgot to do that the first go around. Hmph’ (Combs, 2018). The ‘feminism’ on the new show is very front and centre, but one reviewer thought they were trying too hard, saying ‘a “feminist reboot” of a show already considered pretty feminist will have a lot to live up to, and sadly, Charmed’s attempts feel more like they’re making fun of consent, diversity and other issues rather than a sharp commentary on the moment’ (Eloise, 2018). Fan reaction was mixed. The comments under a YouTube posting of the first official trailer were far from universally welcoming of the idea, with fans of the original show saying for example that it was ‘one of those reboots no one asked for’ (JoBlo TV Show Trailers, 2018). However with a debut that Variety called ‘solid’ (Holloway, 2018) and relatively stable figures across the first half of the season, it was renewed for a second season, and despite suffering a 55% fall in viewers (TV Series Finale, 2019) compared to the opening of the first season, a third season and fourth seasons were subsequently renewed. Its place in the Cult TV canon is still evolving. The next show under discussion is of a very different character. Although some of its characters recall the glamourous young witches of Bewitched and Charmed, with their ambivalent approach to power and their place within the home, American Horror Story: Coven dispenses with such niceties and offers a darker, bloodier and less appealing representation of witchcraft mired in a naked battle for power.

American Horror Story: Coven (FX, 2013) American Horror Story: Coven was the third season of an ongoing drama series structured as an anthology, created by Brad Falchuk and Ryan Murphy. Each season tells a complete story, drawing on narrative tropes and visual references from a particular sub-genre of horror, whilst featuring returning cast members albeit as different characters. Taking horror on television in new dark directions, American Horror Story ‘is an ongoing fever-dream of Gothic delights and brazen exploitation, mixed with occasional moments of campy kitsch’ (Lippert, 2017, p. 182).

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The first season, for example, was set in Los Angeles and retrospectively called Murder House. It was a take on the ‘bad place’ of many a horror story, complete with brutal murders, vengeful ghosts and troubled families. The second series Asylum was set in a 1964 institution for the criminally insane, but included subplots around serial killers, aliens and mad scientists. The third season, Coven, moved its focus back to the present day and was set in New Orleans, featuring a girls’ boarding school, Miss Robichaux’s Academy, which is really the home of the Salem witches’ descendants. Subsequent series have been Freak Show, Hotel, Roanoke, Cult and Apocalypse, with at least two more commissioned. In 2017, King noted that the series drew ‘a large audience despite its late-night scheduling, ostensibly due to its high production value gore and sex scenes’ (King, 2017, p. 557) but that Coven had been particularly popular, concluding its run with some of the highest ratings for the format up till that point. In fact, it has remained the highest rated iteration of the show, hence presumably the reason so many Coven characters got call-backs in Season 8. As with all the Seasons, AHS: Coven offers a range of sprawling storylines, but it broadly follows the fortunes of the few girls who remain at the declining Academy, as the old head of the coven (called the Supreme) is dying and the search is on to find her replacement. Fiona Goode (Jessica Lange) however is far from ready to relinquish power or to die. A second storyline follows an old feud between the witches of the Academy and Marie Laveau (Angela Bassett), the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans. A third explores the history of slavery in the South and circles around the historical character of Delphine LaLaurie (Kathy Bates). These are certainly not domestic witches, worrying about cooking dinner for their husbands or looking after their children, rather the exact opposite, as the most intense rivalry for power in the series is reserved for mother and daughter Fiona and Cordelia Goode (Sarah Paulson). However, the Academy itself does offer a space to call home for many of the characters, even if the interior design is far from cosy. The exterior was the Bruckner House, an actual New Orleans mansion built in the 1850s. Unlike the Spellman Family home discussed below in Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, Miss Robichaux’s Academy does not cover the school in occult symbolism. In fact, the set decorator Ellen Brill said the team took a ‘less is more’ approach, drawing inspiration from an actual plantation house which was painted all white (floors, walls, ceilings) with dark furniture and artworks (Gonzalez, 2013). The production designer, Mark Worthington, wanted to stay close to the New Orleans style more generally for the Academy, choosing furniture with French influences. He said, ‘Everything has a spindly,

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kind of scary framework to it. Anytime it could look spidery we wanted it, because with lighting we knew we could get great reflections on the walls from pieces like that’ (Gonzalez, 2013). However, the overall effect is of a spare, elegant, feminine interior, not in itself intended to be a hostile presence like the Murder House in Season 1 or the Asylum in Season 2. Instead, Worthington noted, ‘This is a sanctuary’ (E!Online, no date), if a rather cold and elegant one, where the witches seem to struggle to make positive emotional connections, as they are pitted against each other to gain the power of the Supreme. None of the witches in AHS: Coven are as equivocal about their power as Samantha and the Halliwell sisters. Perhaps the most unsure is Zoe Benson (Taissa Farmiga) who only discovered her gift when her uncontrolled powers killed her boyfriend as they were having sex. She later runs away with Kyle (Evan Peters), a young man she helped to resurrect but who now has no moral compass, but as they wait at the bus terminal she decides that, as a witch with growing powers, she might be the next Supreme and returns to the competition. In fact, most of the witches at the Academy have strong magical power but also want political power within the world of witches too: at one stage or another, most of the inhabitants of the Academy think that they might be the new Supreme and all enter into the competition ‘The Seven Wonders of Witchcraft’ with gusto. Figuring out just how far some are prepared to go to achieve greater power is the basis of much of the horror. So rather than offering a view of potential female solidarity, the coven is instead a hotbed of political and personal rivalries, even when an external threat in the form of a ‘sacred order’ of male witch hunters called the Delphi Trust is discovered trying to exterminate the coven. Indeed, the threat of witch hunters notwithstanding, there are several battle lines drawn in the show – the competition to become the new Supreme and the feud between the ‘black’ and ‘white’ witches playing out along racial lines, but also referencing the tradition of ‘black’ and ‘white’ magic. The racial element of AHS: Coven has been the most explored by academia. King, for example, points out that the season’s ‘equating women (both white and black) with magic underscores popular fears about women’s power that, if united, women could undo patriarchal structures’ (King, 2017, p. 566), but that the reluctance of the white witches to recognize their own privilege makes any real sisterhood across race impossible. There is, however, a third battle line within the narrative which has received less attention and that is the division between the old women and the young. The old women – Goode, Laveau and Delphine LaLaurie (a racist aristocrat given

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immortality as a punishment) – are pitted against the younger, more beautiful witches such as Cordelia and Zoe Benson. Cordelia’s own mother Fiona, for example, sees her only as a rival and dismisses her as weak. However, despite her best efforts, first retrieving the still living body of Delphine LaLaurie to find out the secret of her immortality, then joining forces with her sworn enemy Laveau to murder an innocent, Fiona is unsuccessful in maintaining her youth or her power over the coven. The glamorous Fiona was never domestic, so the hell to which she is consigned in Seven Wonders (3.13) is a place where she is trapped in the most abject domesticity. She cries, ‘I can’t spend eternity here. It reeks of fish and cat piss.’ The other powerful witch, Marie Laveau, is likewise undone by her own hand. Unable to forgive or forget the wrong done to her by the monstrous LaLaurie who tortured her own daughters alongside the family slaves, Marie fails to present her patron Papa Legba with the innocent soul she promised him, and the two women are consigned to a hell together, where Laveau is meant to carry out LaLaurie’s orders of torture and horror. Even the relatively benign character, Myrtle Snow (Frances Conroy), who is an older witch, a member of the Witches Council, and a substitute mother to Cordelia, is destroyed by the end of the series, also by her own hand. In a convoluted plot twist, Myrtle manages to persuade Cordelia to burn her at the stake (for a second time) because she murdered another member of the Witches Council for burning her alive the first time! She argues that the new Supreme (now Cordelia) needs a fresh start and that requires her death. However, Myrtle manages to be resurrected for a second time by Cordelia in AHS: Apocalypse, who insists she needs Myrtle’s knowledge and guidance (as the apocalypse approaches). By the end of Coven, all the old women are dead, and the younger prettier ones have taken their place and their power. Even in this darker and more brutal scenario, the narrative works to remove the connection to 1970s feminist activism. The text expels the less acceptable faces of the crones – the fading beauty of Fiona, whose power seems to be linked to her sexual allure, the racist LaLaurie and the embittered Marie Laveau. The abject – the old, sick, mad, evil, women who had power – must be expelled so that the pretty, conventional maidens can win the day, for as Creed suggested, ‘the abject must be expelled in order to construct a clean and proper self, repressing behaviour, speech and modes of being regarded as unacceptable, improper or unclean’ (Creed, 1993, p. 37). The series ends with the beautiful, glowing, Cordelia, standing on the Academy’s elegant staircase, flanked by her new council members, Zoe and

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Figure 7  The new Supreme, Cordelia (Sarah Paulson), prepares to meet her new students in American Horror Story: Coven, The Seven Wonders (3.13).

Queenie, to welcome even younger new witches to the school, promising that together they can do more than just survive (see Figure 7). However, in AHS: Apocalypse (2018) survival is once more the name of the game. The coven returned in a pivotal narrative arc involving Cordelia and a young witch called Mallory (Billie Lourd) who is a student at the Academy and potentially powerful enough to oust Cordelia as Supreme. She is, insofar as these things exist in the American Horror Story universe, the hero who is eventually able to turn back time and prevent the apocalypse from occurring in the first place, though at the urging and mentoring of Cordelia and Myrtle. The narrative of Season 8 is full of call-backs to other seasons (Murder House and Hotel as well as Coven), and although the witches eventually have the decisive win, thanks to Mallory’s growing powers, she is not, in fact, on screen for long. New seasons of American Horror Story are still in production, so fan wikis are well populated with regular updates about the characters and the interweaving plotlines. The inclusion of Coven characters in Season 8 naturally added contributions to their entries. Fan art is also regularly posted on Deviantart. com, for example, which features many drawings of Zoe in particular, but there is also a wider interest in the fashion and style of the show, as can also be seen in postings on Pinterest, demonstrating that the restrained black and white aesthetic of the season’s design has remained an important element of the fan’s engagement. There is a significant amount of fan fiction being written. For example, Fanfiction.net has over a thousand Coven-related stories, with a good

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proportion choosing to continue (in a slightly Harry Potter way) the story of the Academy after the ending of the series, while others explore prequel narratives for Cordelia and Misty Day (Lily Rabe). It is interesting that the fans are more willing to explore the possibility of the witches living in relatively peaceful cooperation and sisterhood than the writers of the show.

Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (Netflix, 2020–ongoing) After a quiet few years for witch-focused Cult TV, Netflix released a new series Chilling Adventures of Sabrina in time for Halloween 2018. The ten-part series was a new version of Sabrina the Teenage Witch which had begun life as a spinoff publication from the Archie comics, whose own origins reached back to 1941. The character Archie Andrews was created by John L Goldwater and artist Bob Montana, in collaboration with Vic Bloom, and appeared for the first time in Pep Comics #22, before gaining his own title. In fact, Archie, though not as famous outside America today as Spiderman and Batman, was the first teen comic featuring teenagers (Gabilliet, 2010, p. 24). They offered short formulaic stories, existing in an eternal present, with no necessity for continuity, plot development or character growth but ‘Archie Comics were consistently more popular than Marvel’s much-lauded superhero titles throughout the 1960s’ (Beaty & Woo, 2016, p. 86). By 1985 average sales of Archie had fallen, though they remained among the best-selling titles on the newsstand market, but by 2015, Archie #665, the second to last issue before the title was rebooted, only sold an estimated 3,665 copies (Beaty & Woo, 2016, p. 93). However, the reinvigoration of the Archie brand had already begun. In 2012 an alternate timeline series called Life with Archie followed the hero as an adult. Life with Archie #23 featured a cover depicting Archie surrounded by zombies and a strap line changed to Afterlife with Archie and an apocalyptic storyline promised. This edition sold unusually well and led to an entire Afterlife series in 2013. It was an enormous hit for the company, and an expanded list of darker themed titles was launched, including Chilling Adventures of Sabrina in 2014, written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, a long-time fan of the Archie world. In 2003, Aguirre-Sacasa had written a stage play called Archie’s Weird Fantasy, and although the copyright owners insisted on changes, Aguirre-Sacasa’s enthusiasm did not wane and he became the key creative force at the company, overseeing not just the comic books but also a shift to television: Riverdale featuring Archie and his gang premiered in 2017 for The CW and has

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been renewed for a third series. Meanwhile plans to make use of other Archie Universe characters were also developing. The character of Sabrina the Teenaged Witch was originally conceived by George Gladir and drawn by Dan DeCarlo in 1962, with the character first appearing in Archie’s MadHouse #22. Intermittent appearances and stories led in 1970 to an animation by Filmation Associates and aired on CBS till 1974. The First Sabrina comic books arrived in 1971, but probably the best-known and successful iteration of Sabrina was the live action series Sabrina the Teenage Witch starring Melissa Joan Hart which was essentially a light sitcom series aimed at older children and teens made for Paramount (then CBS). The show ran for 7 seasons, and 163 episodes, as well as 3 TV films between 1996 and 2003. It was repetitive but popular with the target demographic as the comics and cartoons had been previously. Chilling Adventures of Sabrina was first pitched to The CW as a companion show for Riverdale, but Netflix were quick to offer a two-season deal upfront. In fact, Netflix were so confident of its success that a third and fourth series were commissioned almost immediately, indicating that television and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina form an important part of the reinvigoration of the Archie brand for Archie Comic Publications Inc. The series, loosely based on Aguirre-Sacasa’s 2014 comic book series, follows the half human, half witch Sabrina played by Kiernan Shipka in the lead up to her sixteenth birthday, which signals her ‘dark baptism’ into the Church of Night. Sabrina is not sure this is what she really wants, as it means leaving her time at Baxter High and all her human friends, but especially her boyfriend Harvey (Ross Lynch). All four seasons follow the conflicts and tangles of her relationships and responsibilities as she tries to figure out where her loyalty and her love lie. The show Sabrina exists in a state that Hills described as hyperdiegesis, offering a longstanding, if rambling and inconsistent, diegetic world, with the promise of some familiarity, even if it is a new take on an older character, and in this case, a much darker take, with Variety reporting in 2018 that the show ‘takes obvious delight in perverting every ounce of its once wholesome source material’ (Framke, 2018). The show shifts its setting from the 1960s, where the most recent comics were set, but it retains a strong retro feel in the design. The costumes are not obviously contemporary, but as the head of the series’ make-up department said, ‘We take the best of different decades and create this timeless look’ (Soo Hoo, 2018), which clearly references an earlier era, and as one blogger puts it, ‘the costume design is full of prim necklines, bows, and decadent fabrics that lend the show a late-1950s feel’ (Bastién, 2018). However, like Bewitched and Charmed before it, the family

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home is a central site of drama in Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, with the kitchen in particular acting as a focal point for meetings and discussions. Designed by Lisa Soper, the Spellman family home, which also houses the mortuary business, is, like the costumes, full of retro design ideas. The house is full of Tiffany lamps and stained glass which cast interesting colour combinations on the walls, where shoes sit on shelves. There are 1920s designed mugs in the kitchen along with an old-fashioned stove and William Morris-inspired motifs covering the walls. It is busy, complex and lush, managing to give the impression of a dwelling that has been inhabited for a long time. The production designer, Soper, was herself a pagan practitioner (Saraiya, 2018) and incorporated into the Spellman house occult designs and symbolic details that echo the magical world of the Church of Night, the ruling body that controls the witch world in Greendale – for example, Viking runes for resurrection and death were carved into the entryway. The foyer is symmetrical, reflecting Sabrina’s emphasis on balance, and the opposing poles of gender, morality and mortality, but the house as a whole is seemingly a crooked, winding labyrinth and Soper pointed out that ‘there’s not one straight wall in my set, which I know is really difficult for my construction team’ (Friedlander, 2018). However, as Soper makes clear, the house was designed as a ‘sacred spiral’ where choices are made. She explained in one interview: If you walk in the front door and you turn left you can walk around the spiral, which represents that never-ending journey, which really speaks to what Sabrina is dealing with. And at the centre of the spiral in our house, we have these two staircases – one which goes left and one which goes right – where one goes back to the witches’ side and one to the mortal side. ‘The Path of Night’ and ‘The Path of Light’. So like left handed, right handed, boy-girl. It signifies all these different parallels. (Edwards, 2018)

Alongside the occult designs are symbols of the natural world. Rabbits and hares abound because of their folklore associations with witches who were said to be able to shapeshift into the form of a hare, while designs of intertwining trees, flowers and vines cover the walls of the Spellman house, alongside many house plants and a lavish greenhouse indicating, according to Soper, that ‘the Spellman’s are at one with nature. They literally co-exist with it’ (Elderkin, 2018). The magical world of Sabrina is reflected in the design of the family home with its gently green kitchen at its heart, full of flowers and winding plants. Most of the time, the house is Sabrina’s refuge, with the family (consisting of Sabrina, her two aunts and her cousin, Ambrose) meeting round the kitchen table for meals.

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However, in Dreams in a Witch House (1.5) the Spellmans are trapped there by a sleep demon and only with difficulty fight their way free. And in the Christmas Special A Midwinter’s Tale, the house is infested with mischievous ghost children who are only persuaded to leave with great difficulty. The magical world of the Spellmans is an odd mix of the witchcraft traditions discussed earlier in this chapter. There are activities which refer back to the early modern witch tradition with its specific association with the Devil and the practice of maleficia (deeds wrought by supernatural evil). For example, there are plenty of hexes and curses, but in an especially grisly turn, Sabrina discovers she must take part in the coven’s regular Feast of Feasts (1.7) which forms the central storyline in the episode of the same name, where each year a witch is chosen to be devoured by the rest of the coven in a cannibalistic frenzy. However, the coven in Sabrina are not just witches, but Satanists, and as such the writers make use of not only the early modern understanding of witchcraft but also the language of contemporary Satanism. The statue which sits in the central hallway of the witch school, the ‘Academy of the Unseen Arts’, was a version of the goat headed deity Baphomet, designed in 1856 by Eliphas Levi, a French occult practitioner of ceremonial magic. Following the airing of the show, some copyright issues were raised by The Satanic Temple in America which had created a statue of Levi’s design in 2014. Levi’s version of the statue had breasts, as the symbolism of the figure was intended to demonstrate opposites (including male and female); however, neither the versions of the statue in Sabrina nor The Satanic Temple included breasts, a similarity which lent some weight to the dispute. It was eventually resolved out of court with a credit and other undisclosed agreements. In addition to the prominent place of the statue which refers to nineteenth-century magical practice, Father Blackwood (Richard Coyle), who is the High Priest of the Greendale coven and dean of the witches academy, refers at times to Black Masses, the ‘false god’ and ‘‘do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” which was the central axiom of Aleister Crowley’s magical system Thelema, itself a key influencer of contemporary versions of Satanism, which is less about worshipping a dark deity and more about personal freedom. In doing this, Sabrina at least to some extent refers back to the early modern witch tradition, rather than to Gardner’s ‘white witch’ and subsequent versions of Wicca, while indicating a familiarity with contemporary Satanism. This has direct relevance to the question of Sabrina’s autonomy in the drama, as the show’s creator Aguirre-Sacasa, as was the case in Charmed, directly equates magical powers with power, and in choosing to place the practice of

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magic within a Satanism frame, he sets up a paradoxically patriarchal dynamic. As he explained in an interview from 2018: In our universe [meaning the show], witches worship the Dark Lord, who is a patriarchal figure. So the show is kind of based on a paradox: These [sic] women are empowered [because] they’re witches, but they are subservient to a patriarch. (Turchiano, 2018)

Although he insists that the witches are empowered (and they do certainly have powers), it is hard to see how they have autonomy or agency when they depend on a male figure (the Dark Lord) as the source of their power, at least in Season 1. This is made clear in The Dark Baptism (1.2) with the disturbing image of the young Sabrina dressed only in a white shift, kneeling at the feet of the sumptuously clad Father Blackwood as he demands she swear allegiance to the church, which makes clear through its visuals the power imbalance in the relationship. Father Blackwood remains the face of Sabrina’s enemies and opposition, even wishing himself Emperor of Greendale in The Imp of the Perverse (4.4). However, this patriarchal power does not remain unchallenged and by Season 3, the whole coven’s relationship with their ‘Dark Lord’ Lucifer (Luke Cook) is in some turmoil, and they eventually turn to the goddess Hecate (originally a Greek goddess who became associated with the triple-faced goddess in modern Wiccan practice) as their spiritual focus. In fact, by Season 4, Lucifer has been forced to become co ruler with his daughter before finally exiled from his Infernal Realm altogether by the vengeful Lilith. Neither Father Blackwood’s nor Lucifer’s power remains by the finale of the story. In Season 1, Sabrina certainly has powerful male characters telling her what to do but her own contemporaries are not always allies because Sabrina has two competing ‘covens’ or groupings of female power to choose from. At Baxter High, her friends Roz (Jaz Sinclair) and Susie/Theo (Lachlan Watson) are fighting with the principal and the football jocks. Over the four Seasons, Roz discovers she is losing her sight, but is gaining in ‘otherworldly’ sight, according to her dying grandmother. Meanwhile Susie manages to summon up the ghost of her dead ancestress Dorothea Putnam (Anastasia Bandey) who continues to offer advice and guidance. They are Sabrina’s best friends, and confidantes, but there is a rival group for Sabrina’s attentions. Known as the Weird sisters, they are three witches, Prudence (Tati Gabrielle) Dorcas (Abigail Cowen) and Agatha (Adeline Rudolph), who already attend the Unseen Academy and who rule as the ‘queen bitches’ there. They are spiteful and arrogant, casually murderous even, and in their first appearance cast a blood curse on Sabrina as she tries to summon a wild

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familiar. Revelations towards the end of the series make it clear that Prudence is the illegitimate daughter of Father Blackwood, and the other two are orphans, making some of their arrogance perhaps the result of low self-esteem. Sabrina makes her at first temporary alliance with the Weird sisters in order to protect Susie, when, in The Dark Baptism (1.2), she seeks their help to teach the bullying football players a magical lesson, though the sisters go considerably further than Sabrina intended. Later, when Sabrina begins attending the Academy, as well as Baxter High, the Weird Sisters enact The Harrowing against her, a form of witch school hazing, but one in which madness or death is a distinct possibility. Sabrina withstands their bullying, and then, surprisingly, goes out on a limb to save Prudence from being eaten by the coven in Feast of Feasts (1.7) despite Prudence’s desire to undergo the ‘honour’. In The Returned Man (1.9) Sabrina once again enlists their help in resurrecting Harvey’s brother after he is killed in an apparent mining accident (which in fact the Weird Sisters caused in the first place). Their relationship is fractious and competitive, with the sisters decrying Sabrina’s half human status and Sabrina disliking their ‘pure blood’ conceit and unthinking acquiescence to Church of Night convention. The final scenes of Season 1 foreground the continued conflicts between her ‘covens’. Susie, Roz and Harvey are sitting in the School library wondering what will happen next now that they know that Sabrina is a witch and speculating on whether or not Sabrina is still the girl they know and still their friend. The scene then cuts to the final shot of Season 1 featuring the now white haired Sabrina at the Academy, walking in slow motion with the Weird Sisters, dressed in their retro style of long-sleeved, demure neckline dresses complete with lace pie crust collars, but short hemlines. Sabrina winks at the camera. In time, Sabrina is able to bring her two groups of friends, if not precisely together, then at least able to work as allies. Sabrina is also surrounded by a number of older female figures, who bring their own agendas to bear: her two aunts and Miss Wardwell (Michelle Gomez). The orphaned Sabrina has been brought up by her two aunts: Zelda (Miranda Otto) – a staunch believer in the Church of Night who reads her newspaper at the breakfast table like many fathers of sitcom before her, but seems in thrall to the coven head Father Blackwood – and the bubbly, giggly and sympathetic Hilda (Lucy Davis) – often to be found in the kitchen, who is far more maternal towards Sabrina, and whose loyalty is to her niece long before the coven. Zelda and Hilda are not as old or as powerful as Fiona and Marie from AHS: Coven, but they are of the previous generation and like them are seemingly not entirely to be trusted for they have not always told the truth about Sabrina’s parents and her situation. Zelda is an intense believer in the Church of Night and the coven

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within which they live in Greendale and laments the loss in stature and influence of the Spellman family. The loss of her youthful appearance in The Trial of Sabrina Spellman (1.3) seems to affect her far more than Hilda. Zelda’s loyalties seem, at least at first, to lie with the witches’ authority figures rather than with Sabrina, to the extent of entering into an affair with Father Blackwood and later marrying him. Hilda on the other hand is frequently the one to directly care for Sabrina, such as matter-of-factly curing a blood curse in October Country (1.1) without being asked. However Hilda also withholds from Sabrina the fact that she helped her human mother baptize the infant Sabrina into the Christian Church. She has doubts about the Church of Night but is slow to voice them or directly support Sabrina’s rebellion. Sabrina also at times turns to Miss Wardwell, seemingly one of Sabrina’s teachers, for a sympathetic ear and advice, but Miss Wardwell is also Lilith, a demon in the service of Satan who has been sent to make sure that Sabrina undergoes her oath of loyalty to Satan, who also pursues her own agenda for power. At first she works covertly as a helpful teacher, even though by Dreams in a Witch House (1.5) Sabrina has figured out that Miss Wardwell has become someone else. The demon admits this and persuades Sabrina that she can be her magical mentor, but secretly continues to manipulate Sabrina into signing the Book, eventually raising the Greendale Thirteen, witches abandoned by the coven to be hanged in the early days of the colony, to threaten the whole town. Sabrina, faced with the possibility of her family, the coven and the town being wiped out, signs the book. At the end of The Witching Hour (1.10) Miss Wardwell’s full demon identity is revealed. Speaking to a tied-up and soon-to-be ex Principal of the school, she explains that ‘once I finish grooming Sabrina to take my place as Satan’s foot soldier, I’ll earn a crown and a throne by his side. Who am I? I’m the future Queen of Hell’. However her familiar (a raven) chips in to ask if Satan is instead grooming Sabrina to rule at his side, not Madam Satan herself, to which she responds by breaking its neck. Despite temporary alliances, such as The Mephisto Waltz (2.9), Lilith remains a much in conflict with Sabrina as Lucifer over her desire for the throne and her ability to hold on to it, requiring Sabrina to give it to her several times, before finally grabbing it for herself. All this appears to set up a dynamic, familiar from AHS: Coven, where older women are depicted as seeing younger women as rivals for power, thus making solidarity between groups of older and younger women unstable, as the fight for male attention becomes central. However, as Sabrina is able to make cause with both her contemporary covens, there are also moments when old and young join forces (see Figure 8). In An

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Figure 8  A moment of intergenerational solidarity as Sabrina joins forces with the older witches to perform an exorcism. Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, An Exorcism in Greendale (1.6).

Exorcism in Greendale (1.6) Sabrina, her aunts and Madam Satan all join forces to perform a witch exorcism against a demon (which is forbidden) calling on a long list of ancestors. Even Zelda comes at the last moment, and all four call upon their ancestor witches (all female even though there are warlocks) to act on their behalf. ‘We call forth the witches from the shade’, they shout. ‘Those who came before us and died that we might live. Visit us, sisters. Intercede on our behalf. I call forth the powers of Lilith … ’ and go on to name a long list of historical and legendary female figures. As the show has developed, Sabrina has been able to find a different ending to the story told by AHS: Coven, one that weaves in an interesting way through the complexities of power relationships between the generations. Towards the end of Season 2, Sabrina’s origins are becoming clear as the Dark Lord himself comes to Greendale, revealing that he is Sabrina’s father and intends to marry Sabrina and make her Queen of Hell to trigger the apocalypse. Lilith is far from happy with this and conspires with the Spellmans and Sabrina’s friends to thwart Lucifer’s plans, managing to trap him in the body of Sabrina’s erstwhile boyfriend Nick (Gavin Leatherwood). In the season finale (2.9) even though Sabrina has rendered herself without magic, everyone – mortal friends, ‘frenemies’ from the Academy of Unseen Arts and her family – comes together to help defeat the Dark Lord. It is truly a team effort. In one of the final scenes, at the gate of hell itself, Sabrina removes Satan’s crown from her head and gives it to Lilith, who crowns herself and restores Sabrina’s magic, announcing that Sabrina now has ‘power and freedom’ before taking the slumbering Lucifer into her new kingdom. Shortly afterwards, Aunt Zelda proclaims herself the new High Priestess of the Church of Lilith. So whilst Sabrina herself chooses not to

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take power as such, she has her magical abilities restored and the older women in the story are transformed into her now more powerful guardians. Season 3 reopened the question of power with an uprising in Hell and Sabrina forced to take the throne after all, before eventually through a time paradox, two versions of Sabrina emerged: one who wants to continue being a Greendale teenager, and one who is finally crowned Queen of Hell. Initially, Season 4 presented this as a neat way to manage Sabrina’s conflicts, but rather than bringing Sabrina’s paradoxes and contradictions to a resolution, the show’s ultimate conclusion instead delivered a sudden halt: the death of both Sabrinas and both her communities left mourning for her. Many fans were hugely critical with numerous complaints about plot holes and lack resolution for major character arcs, including Sabrina’s herself. A final scene in the ‘sweet hereafter’ where Sabrina is joined by Nick who admits to committing suicide so he could join her, rather than being seen as a happy ending came in for particular complaint. Sabrina saved the people she loved by passively allowing herself to bleed to death, but for many this was a disappointing end for the powerful witch she seemed to have become. More generally, fan activity around it is lively, although the main fan wiki is part of the wider Archieverse site (Archieverse Wiki, no date), and fan convention activity folds the two shows together. There is much online discussion, fostered by the showrunner Aguirre-Sacasa himself, of a crossover possibility. There are a good number of online blogs and videos offering episode breakdowns, responding to fan theories and speculations about the characters and the direction of the narrative. Fan fiction has also been picking up with an Archive of Our Own showing over a thousand fan fiction entries tagged with Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. The stories explore a range of slash fiction, with the most popular being a Mary Wardwell/Aunt Zelda pairing, with a significant number of Father Blackwood/Aunt Zelda story extensions. Sabrina’s boyfriend dilemma over whether Harvey Kinkle or Nick Scratch (Gavin Leatherwood) is really the one for her is also explored, though predictably solved fairly often by fans by having Harvey and Nick choose each other, or by Sabrina choosing both. There is some cosplay discussion amongst fans, but it is clear from the sheer number of similar online articles in October 2018, such as Teen Vogue (Matera, 2018) and Fashionista (Soo Hoo, 2018), to name but two, that marketing of the show was partly based around Halloween costume possibilities, so this is not as grassroots as it might appear, much like the edited title sequence for Sabrina based on the Buffy the Vampire Slayer title sequence (DoingOK, 2018), which proved popular on YouTube, but the date that it dropped (the same date as the show appeared

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on Netflix) makes it also look more like marketing disguised as fan activity. The fan art website Deviantart.com has over 150,000 fan-produced drawings tagged with the show. It would be fair to say, however, that the fans of Chilling Adventures of Sabrina have, so far, not been as active, creative, vocal (or perhaps even as genuine), as those of Wynonna Earp which is discussed in the following chapter, but the dilemmas of Sabrina in charting her own path do seem to be triggering the transcendent function for some fans. The witch-based dramas discussed in this chapter are surprisingly domestic, the home proving a key feature in the mise en scène, with narrative tension created between the pull of domestic responsibilities and perhaps motherhood, and the possibility of autonomous power for the individual women portrayed, which is a daily debate for many women still. This chapter explored some of the contested history of witchcraft, from the witch trials of the early modern period to the invention of Wicca and other magical systems in the twentieth century, all of which have served as background to a greater or lesser extent in the shows discussed. All made some connection between magical power and female empowerment, but as we saw in the previous chapter, often the heroines with power are controlled by a higher authority, sometimes the mysterious source of their powers. Samantha has her power removed by the Council of Witches; the Halliwells are contained by the Elders amongst the Whitelighters, and Sabrina’s family have been controlled by the Church of Night who can also remove their power as punishment, though ultimately breaking free. AHS: Coven is slightly different, with power such as Marie Laveau’s youth and beauty being granted by supernatural entities such a Papa Legba, who is also quick to remove it. The narrative outcomes for the heroines, such as they exist in such long running shows, are often framed in conventional happily ever after domestic bliss. The only narrative where a central character was rewarded with further power (Sabrina herself only maintains it) was AHS: Coven, where the beautiful Cordelia rises to become the Supreme at the cost of the older women. Individual autonomy is not a given. Nor is female solidarity via the ‘coven’ which is often shown to be temporary and prone to disruption by male interest. The lack of older women is a remarkable omission, and either generational solidarity is ‘ghostly’ in nature or the older women are depicted as the carping enemies of the younger women, although again American Horror Story starts to unpick this in AHS: Apocalypse.

4

Warrior women

The warrior is the most common Cult TV heroines, but often appears as a side kick or in ensemble – the savage Leela (Louise Jameson) was companion to the Fourth Doctor Who (Tom Baker) in 1977–8; Tasha Yar (Denise Crosby) was the short-lived security chief aboard Picard’s Enterprise in Star Trek: The Next Generation; Susan Ivanova (Claudia Christian) in Babylon 5 (Warner Bros, 1994–7) first served as military commander under Jeffrey Sinclair (Michael O’Hare); soldier Aeryn Sun (Claudia Black) fell in love with astronaut Crichton (Ben Browder) in Farscape; Starbuck originally a male character came back as a woman (Katee Sackhoff) in the rebooted Battlestar Galactica (2004–9, NBC) and made feminist headlines as the maverick pilot, rebellious troublemaker and burned-out soldier, all well-worn tropes imported direct from adventure heroes but transplanted into a female body. Starbuck swaggered, gambled and smoked cigars and served under Admiral Adama (Edward James Olmos). Game of Thrones (HBO, 2011–19) had several contenders from tomboy Arya Stark (Maisie Williams) who learns to be a master assassin, to the knight Brienne of Tarth (Gwendoline Christie) able to beat the notoriously violent Sandor Clegane (Rory McCann) in hand-to-hand combat. When it comes to the active, physical and sometimes violent female warrior trope in Cult TV, there is much choice, but when it comes to shows that are built round such characters, as we regularly find, the scope is smaller. This chapter will focus on Wonder Woman (ABC, 1975–9), Xena: Warrior Princess (NBCUniversal, 1995–2001), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (20th Century Fox 1997–2003) and Wynonna Earp (Syfy, 2017–2021) as the stories with warrior heroines for whom fighting is a particular focus in the narrative. They are all tough, have physical stamina, strength and ability to fight as their defining features. Diana Prince (Lynda Carter) teams up with Steve Trevor (Lyle Waggoner) to fight the Nazis with her Amazonian strength, Xena (Lucy Lawless) roams a mythological land seeking to right wrongs and protect the innocent

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with her fighting prowess, Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar) is the Slayer of vampires and demons, whilst Wynonna Earp (Melanie Scrofano) is destined to fight the revenants of all those that her ancestor the famous sheriff Wyatt Earp killed. These heroines are some of the most popular and written-about characters in this book, academically or otherwise. Indeed when using the word ‘heroine’ in general conversation, these seem to be the characters who spring quickest to mind, even amongst non-Cult TV fans. The traditional male warrior hero is a story which has become well known through Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces work on mythologies from around the world, and has been taken up with great enthusiasm by script writers. It remains an open question however as to whether female heroes can be simply substituted for male heroes or whether for a female warrior, enacting force and violence in order to ‘save the day’ might been seen as a ‘daughter of patriarchy’, one who internalizes patriarchal values and acts accordingly, rather than being a model of feminist success. Female warriors present, particularly acutely, the paradoxes that heroines more generally embody. Warrior heroines seem to have autonomy, thus offering alternative storytelling possibilities with visions of potential liberation for women, but at the same time they reproduce constraint and conventional ideas of what women should be, and the relationship between fantasy and consensual reality remains in tension. We begin with a consideration of appearance and the markers of ‘toughness’. Time and again in this book we see the potential power and agency of the heroine ‘softened’ by conventional notions of feminine beauty, which remains intact regardless of her trials, something that Inness, with special reference to Xena, calls ‘indestructible beauty’ (Inness, 1999, p. 174). Hair may be briefly tousled, but not for long, and make-up remains intact, since none of the warrior women appear to sweat regardless of their exertions. As such, conventional female beauty standards created by lengthy grooming routines and an army of stylists are left unchallenged. The heroines can be tough as they like as long as they continue to look pretty – a paradox and an impossible ideal which is left undisturbed in every drama in this book. This idea of ‘toughness’ is worth closer attention, an often taken-for-granted characteristic performed by heroes of all stripes, and is the focus of Tough Girls (1999), although Inness is not solely concerned with warrior heroines in her book. First, Inness suggests the body itself can be a marker of toughness. It is typically a fit, athletic one, with well-defined muscles, and it is also worth adding that it is white and able bodied.

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With the exception of Xena, played by the 1.77 m tall Lawless, the other three characters are not particularly physically imposing or muscular, in fact Sarah Michelle Gellar is quite a diminutive 1.63 m. They all look fit and slim on the screen and well within the bounds of conventional attractiveness for women. Again, with the possible exception of Lawless as Xena, the physical strength of their characters is not signalled through height or obvious muscle, as might be the case with a male warrior. Although occasionally shown working out and training for combat, often with a male partner, the physical prowess of the four characters really comes from supernatural or mythical sources, rather than conventional physical strength. Diana Prince is an Amazon, Buffy is the Slayer and Wynonna Earp is Wyatt’s heir. The source of Xena’s strength is never made entirely clear, however, as she is not a god, an Amazon or any kind of ‘chosen one’, leading Kevin Sorbo, who played Hercules in Xena’s sister show Hercules: the Legendary Journeys, to comment on this omission. Hercules was half god, hence his strength, but ‘Xena was able to do everything Hercules can do and more … They made her a doctor and so many other things. And I found it just weird. You know, make her a kick-ass chick … but to give her my strength on top of it was weird’ (Weisbrot, 2004, p. 16). Perhaps the writers felt a need to overcompensate for the fact that this warrior was a woman. Costume is also an important signifier of toughness, although the warriors in this chapter seem to wear ‘ridiculously impractical outfits for warriors’ (Margoulick, 2006, p. 743). Wonder Woman’s costume is a bustier and blue spangled pants, only vaguely recalling Ancient Greece and focusing on the American setting, at least in terms of the red, white and blue colour choices. It is not totally impractical for action, although her knee-high red boots have quite a heel on them and given the amount of flesh on display her clothing does not provide much protection, or particularly signal strength. Xena wears a leather armour bustier and short leather kilt more reminiscent of the vaguely Greco-Roman world in which the drama is set. Her boots are also knee high and suggestive of greaves (lower leg protection) of ancient Greece, but at least there are no high heels and it does signify toughness a little more convincingly. Wynonna Earp broadcasts in the summer, but the show was shot over the winter in Canada, meaning the costumes have tended to feature much greater coverage, including boots, scarves and gloves. In Season 1, Wynonna Earp is the bad girl returning to her hometown and she sports a leather biker jacket, long a signifier of counter-cultural rebellion, but in subsequent seasons the look is softened a little into puffy anoraks with huge fur hoods, reminiscent of Marlene Dietrich’s glamour in Shanghai Express (Josef von Sternberg, 1932). Wynonna inhabits a

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back country town and lives on a ranch, and is usually seen in jeans, tank top and biker boots. Wonder Woman as Diana Prince and Buffy Summers almost all of the time do not signal their fighting ability through costume; indeed, the opposite is true. Diana is at pains to be conventionally attractive to Steve, and Buffy is a high school girl and famously, her character was based on the idea of the pretty cheerleader who is usually the first victim in a horror film turning out to be the Chosen One and a kick-ass fighter. In Buffy the Vampire Slayer the contradiction of her feminine appearance and fierce fighting skills (including the magical ability to run in high heels) is a deliberate one. For Inness, attitude is another marker of toughness: showing little fear, being competent and in control. Xena, Buffy and Wynonna do not scream or cry very often, and all demonstrate their tough attitude through a certain wise cracking banter in the face of danger, harking back to Mrs Peel’s froideur when tied up and facing overwhelming odds. Wynonna adds a goofy charm in the occasional clumsiness in getting a good bon mot out such as in Blood Red and Going Down (3.1) where she announces ‘Boys, we’ve got the Ghost River Triangle under control!’ before tripping over a sign lying in the street, giving her character a more human demeanour. Wonder Woman by way of contrast plays it straight and is more often found making the moral of the story clear with a statement about the importance of truth, justice and democracy than wise cracking, but at the same time she is never discommoded by danger and is always cool under fire. The warrior women in this chapter may not have bulging muscles or always dress tough, but they do have attitude in spades. Action and authority complete the characteristics of toughness for Inness, meaning that the tough heroine acts when others hesitate, taking a leadership role in times of adversity, though there is a caveat in that her ‘actions are larger than real life, showing not reality but a myth and a parody at the same time’ (Inness, 1999, p. 26), but the heroine’s ability to act decisively under extreme duress is part of the fantasy that draws the audience to these heroines. Finally, Inness mentions ‘authority’ because a leader without authority is incapable of leading. A true enough statement, but the question of how one comes to have personal and leadership authority is more complex and is discussed in more depth in Chapter 6. However, as discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, the question of who holds ultimate authority is an important one, more acute for the warrior women as it has a direct bearing on their ability to act as autonomous individuals. The authority figures in Chapter 2 were shadowy affairs, standing behind the investigating duos, and the witches too often seem to be regulated by some kind of magical council, but the warriors seem to be more directly controlled.

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As Margoulick pointed out, the problem is that ‘these women are all controlled and formed by men. Men give them their strength, help them to channel whatever power they have, and are always lurking, either as potential lovers, as controlling father figures or bosses, as potential threats, or sometimes all three at once’ (Margoulick, 2006, p. 735). Indeed, masculine control is never missing for long in many of the dramas discussed in this book. Sometimes it appears as empowerment and validation, sometimes manifesting in a more coercive way, even in the same character. For example, Buffy is ruled by the Council of Watchers and more specifically her own Watcher Mr Giles (Anthony Stewart Head) who advises and trains Buffy, but for a long time he withholds crucial information from her. Wynonna’s power derives from being the female descendent of a powerful male and, at least to some extent, has been in the power of the shadowy Black Badge Division. Perhaps the worry is that these heroines are in need of a father figure, as the number of fathers missing from the narratives points to at least some debate about where power lies. Wonder Woman of course has no father, being, in the television series, a creation of her mother Queen Hippolyta. There is confusion around the question of whether Xena’s father is Atrius of Amphipolis or Ares the god of war with suggestions aplenty in the text for both possibilities: see, for example, Ties that Bind (1.20) for Atrius, The Furies (2.1) for Ares; however, in Season 5, in typical Xena fashion, seemed to throw that notion back out of the window. Fan theories still abound on the subject (see Dekker, 2001). Buffy’s father Hank Summers (Dean Butler) is mostly an absentee parent, and when her mother dies in Season 5, Buffy is not able to contact him. Wynonna shot and killed her father by mistake whilst trying to save her sister Willa from being abducted by revenants. Fathers per se are more absent than present, leaving the field open for substitute fathers representing social patriarchal power to take their place, but consequently the power structures are confusing and the route to power and autonomy for the heroines difficult. There is one final point to be made before turning to each individual series in more detail. Crosby (2004) pointed out the narrative ‘snap’ that often accompanies the heroine’s move towards autonomy. By ‘snap’ she meant the ‘rubber band’ effect in narratives which seems to punish the heroine for demonstrating independence and power: the further she goes, the more brutal the punishment, but the surest act to bring this reversal about is sex. Eroticism and consummated lust result in almost immediate punishment for the female warrior. It is a troubling trend and one that does not afflict male heroes to the same extent. The punishment of the female protagonist for having sex was noticed by Pratt in her

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wide-ranging review of quest myth structures in women’s fiction, who pointed out that when women heroes ‘seek erotic freedom, which we define simply as the right to make love when and with whom they wish, they meet all the opposition of the patriarchy’ (Pratt, 1981, p. 24). The confusing issue for female heroes is that their lover is often the one to deliver the punishment. Male heroes ‘do not typically find their ultimate and strongest foe, their tormentor and controller, in the person of their true love partner’ (Margoulick, 2006, p. 743), but then this is always a danger in a patriarchal society where violence can erupt in the most intimate domestic spaces. The warrior woman has become a well-accepted figure in contemporary Western storytelling but the tougher she is, the tougher her potential male partners become, locking her into a kind of ‘toughness arms race’. As the heroines get stronger, their male romantic partners get ever more exceptional, more violent, more knowledgeable, more (a)moral even and he becomes a demon, an angel, a super warrior, the devil himself in response. Writers and audiences are willing to imagine women as active or violent, but find it harder to imagine that men could be less. In these shows therefore, the softer character tends to be a female side kick, who offers the tough heroine access to emotional support and counsel is usually another woman, rather than a male. Gentler males who are present are never seen as potential partners for the heroine. Joxer is a joke in Xena; Xander is never in the running to win Buffy’s heart and Jeremy (a Season 2 introduction to Wynonna Earp) is gay. So the violence and strength of the warrior heroine seem to call ever-stronger male lovers and require an especially violent response, possibly because the female warrior comes closest to treading on the territory of the warrior hero. In any case it often calls out an immediate narrative ‘snap’ for the warrior heroine. Buffy demonstrates this particular narrative trope most acutely and does not just suffer this fate once but three times in the course of the series but this theme will be picked up again. The warrior women in this chapter articulate a position that could be described as doubly deviant. They do not inhabit a traditional female subject position of hero-adjacent and/or the love prize requiring rescued. Instead, as the heroes of the tale, they strive to occupy a traditionally masculine subject position in being the active, central protagonist around whom the narrative revolves. They are strong and brave and fight violence with violence, but as their stories wander into unknown territory, the limits of their power are demonstrated through the narrative ‘rubberband’ effect which snaps them back into more familiar territory through punishments of suicide and death. Some

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things are beginning to change, but narrative punishment for erotic encounters is changing very slowly indeed.

Wonder Woman (ABC/CBS 1975–9) A book on the history of Wonder Woman began with the following observation: ‘Wonder Woman is a recognisable figure: gold tiara, invisible jet, fights bad guys, looks like Lynda Carter. She’s a role model for many, and the most famous female superhero in a genre dominated by males. She’s also been a feminist icon since Gloria Steinem put her on the first cover of Ms. magazine in 1972’ (Hanley, 2014, p. x). However, it would be more accurate to say that she has been a feminist icon since she was created as a comic book character by William Moulton Marston first appearing in All-Star Comics back in November 1941 even managing at times over the years to out sell Superman (Hanley, 2014, p. 17). Although she was created during the Golden Age of comics when the women’s conventional place was in the home, Wonder Woman’s roots are surprisingly feminist. Her creator, William Moulton Marston, had studied psychology at Harvard University and was also the inventor of the lie detector test. Marston’s personal life was unconventional, living in a polyamorous relationship with two women, having children with both. His wife Elizabeth, also with psychology and law degrees, continued to work after having children, co-authoring the research which led to the lie detector test. Olive, although also well educated, stayed home and ran the household, but lest she seem too traditionally domestic, her aunt was Margaret Sanger, a famous American birth control advocate. Marston was surrounded by strong women (which perhaps makes the revelation that he was also ‘a kinky bondage enthusiast’ (Hanley, 2014, p. xi) less of a surprise) and his family’s quietly sensational life story has been told in a film directed by Angela Robinson called Professor Marston and the Wonder Women (2018). It may seem some distance from his work as a psychologist to the creator of a comic book heroine, but in the late 1930s, Marston published an article in defence of comic books which had been causing something of a media panic at the time due to their popularity. As a result, he was invited to sit on the editorial advisory board of the comic publisher All-American Publications. In 1943 he published another article in which he stated that the main worry about the comics was their ‘blood-curdling masculinity’ (Hanley, 2014, p. 13) and he pitched a female superhero to All-American to give young readers an alternative. She was called ‘Suprema the Wonder Woman’, which the editor shortened to Wonder Woman

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and he began writing under the pen name Charles Moulton, which still appeared on the 1970s TV series credits as the show’s creator. It is worth mentioning Wonder Woman’s radical roots, because, Gloria Steinam notwithstanding, of all the heroines in this chapter, the Wonder Woman who appeared on television in the 1970s is the least challenging. Wonder Woman, an Amazon princess, has to pretend to be Steve Trevor’s secretary but to contemporary eyes it is hard to see what she needed Trevor for at all, except that Season 1 was set during the 1940s. By the time the show returned for Season 2, Diana, was partnered with Steve’s son (played by the same actor), and had been ‘promoted’ to his associate rather than his secretary. Carter herself said of the show in 1978: We’re not on a soapbox. There are definitely messages in the show, but they’re reasonably subtle. Otherwise people would turn off the television in two minutes. I want people to enjoy the show, most of all. It’s exciting. It’s fun. Seeing the show should make people feel great! It’s not preaching – it’s a dramatic action comedy about a very special lady. (Colman, 1978)

Wonder Woman was a ‘special lady’, with the emphasis on ‘lady’, and the show was careful not to challenge hegemonic ideology too robustly. In 1975, Wonder Woman joined Charlie’s Angels and The Bionic Woman as a regular of American mainstream television and ran for three seasons. The twenty-four-year-old Lynda Carter, 1972 Miss World USA, took on the role of Wonder Woman, though as she said in an interview, she was no stranger to the character. ‘I was always an avid comic reader’, she said, ‘and Wonder Woman was one of my favourites. It was neat that she could be anything she wanted to be …. I like the fact that Wonder Woman isn’t invincible. But she has very strong weapons on her side – truth, simplicity and wisdom’ (Colman, 1978). In the same interview, she summed up Wonder Woman as ‘a very feminine woman … She’s beautiful, but she accepts her beauty and isn’t overly impressed by it’ (Colman, 1978). However, Liz Friedman, a Xena producer, said in 1997 ‘Wonder Woman’s nails were always perfect, and she really looked like she cared about it’ (Flaherty, 1997) before contrasting her with Xena who was more likely to ‘punch the crap’ out of her opponents. This Wonder Woman was the impossible epitome of a lady: polite, well groomed, ready with a charming smile and an encouraging word, slow to use force and never lost her temper. Season 1 was set in the 1940s and maintained much in common with the original comic book creation. The Amazon Princess Diana, after returning the crashed pilot Major Steve Trevor (Lyle Waggoner) to America, takes on an

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undercover role as Diana Prince, a yeoman in the navy acting as Trevor’s secretary. Seasons 2 and 3, however, were set in the contemporary 1970s. After Season 1, ABC had been slow to authorize a second series and CBS stepped in under the condition that the show moved to a contemporary period (with its associated cheaper production costs). Because of her Amazon heritage Diana had not visibly aged in the intervening period but Lyle Waggoner had to come back as Steve’s son, which had the effect of damping down the potential romantic plot between them. The show also took on a more familiar episodic narrative with various assignments and villains to be overcome each week, with little to no narrative development over the course of the seasons. Although there were still episodes with references to the Second World War, these gradually faded away to be replaced with more sf-based storylines featuring weird science, spies, hypnotism and mind control from aliens, rogue jewel thieves, rock stars and androids. The stories were simplistic and deliberately cartoonish, or perhaps ‘comic-book-ish’ is more accurate. The mise en scène was generally bright and colourful, if not particularly detailed, with the illustrated comic book panels of the title sequence and the design of the change of scene intertitles that appeared on screen in graphic design boxes and comic book style font, keeping the show’s origins clear. Television did add one new element to the myth of Wonder Woman however – the spin that signalled Diana Prince’s transition to Wonder Woman, which Carter herself added to the mix (Entertainment Weekly, 2005). At the start of Season 2, Diana is back on Paradise Island, in an almost identical storyline to Season 1. The son of Steve Trevor, with the Inter Agency Defence Command (IADC) rather than the army, is travelling with a team of physicists working on a nuclear project, when a terrorist causes the plan to crash land. Diana persuades her mother that the world still needs Wonder Woman and goes through an oddly perfunctory competition with a sister Amazon to win her right to go back to the outside world. Using a combination of hypnotism and computer hacking, she insinuates herself into Steve’s team as his associate and an employee of the IADC in Washington where she takes up her dual crime fighting role. Although the first episode of the 1970s Wonder Woman seemed to spend a surprising amount of time on Diana finding an apartment and going shopping for clothes, Diana’s role in Seasons 2 and 3 was in fact presented as more equal to and independent of Steve. Indeed, in the episode The Return of Wonder Woman (2.1), the new Steve spends most of the episode unconscious, knocked out by gas or by a gang of ruffians, which Wonder Woman must both times rescue him from (see Figure 9), and towards the end of the episode, Diana, as his associate, is seated beside him at the US delegation table.

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Figure 9  Diana (Lynda Carter) rescues an unconscious Steve (Lyle Waggoner) from a plane crash. Wonder Woman, The Return of Wonder Woman (2.1).

By the end of Season 3 she is moving out on her own even further. In The Boy Who Knew Her Secret Part 2 (3.21), Diana is sent on a mission to California, where she is then cut off from Steve or any outside aid. Of course, she succeeds in dealing with the alien body snatchers but then intimates that she is being posted to the Los Angeles office of the IADC, and in the following episode The Man Who Couldn’t Die (3.22) she is there in Los Angeles, removal truck and all, meeting her new boss and making new friends, and no sign of Steve Trevor at all. These were the final episodes in production order, seeming to set the stage for a possible Season 4, where Diana would have been more independent and working in Los Angeles, but the final two episodes as broadcast revert to Washington and Diana working with/for Steve to thwart the plans of an international spy who wants to use a theme park as his base of operations. Although often remembered fondly, the TV version of Wonder Woman is far from a towering presence in the online world of fan communities. It has an incomplete wiki which sits within a larger DC Universe wiki (hosted on wikia. com), with little fan fiction associated with the TV series itself. In fact, although Lynda Carter might be well known as the face of Wonder Woman, the TV drama

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itself is now mostly mentioned as a footnote to the hugely successful 2017 movie. Wonder Woman (Patty Jenkins, 2017) has rebooted the character in a more contemporary form, bringing the character back to full public consciousness, though it is interesting that she now has a back story much like Batman or Superman in the process. Previously, Wonder Woman had no personal tragedy to resolve as many of the male superheroes do, but the movie introduces an attack on Themiscyra which kills her aunt and many other Amazons, and adds an origin story about her father, so that in this version rather than being the sole creation of her mother Queen Hippolyta, Diana was created by Zeus to be a weapon against the Ares resurgent god of war, so we see a reinstatement of a powerful male creator lurking in the background of our warrior women. A television reboot was briefly mooted in 2011 for NBC, with David E. Kelley as showrunner, but although a pilot was shot, it was never picked up by any of the US networks. It seems likely plans for the movie remake were already coming into focus and the movie’s successful release in 2017, which was not only directed by a woman but broke the received wisdom about the unprofitability of female-led superhero films, killed off any lingering plans for television. Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman is a powerful character with her own story that Steve (Chris Pine) is part of but not the core, and at least one sequel is due. Wonder Woman is now a transmedia phenomenon, better loved in comic book or feature film form, with the television show only the lesser-known bridge between. However, further discussion of this version of Wonder Woman takes us away from the television focus of this book, and in the intervening years, a new warrior princess had emerged.

Xena: Warrior Princess (Renaissance Pictures, 1995–2001) Xena: Warrior Princess was a six-season global success, a boisterous reworking of various myths and legends, telling the story of Xena (Lucy Lawless), an evil warlord, known as the Destroyer of Nations, who turns from her violent ways to seek redemption. With the help of the initially naive Gabrielle (Renée O’Connor), Xena travels the land, righting wrongs and atoning for her past misdeeds. Like The Bionic Woman, discussed in the following chapter, Xena made her first appearance in a long-running series built around a male protagonist, in this case Hercules the Legendary Journeys (Renaissance Pictures, 1995–9). Xena was introduced as an opponent of Hercules in a three-episode story arc beginning with The Warrior Princess (1.9) that was meant to end in her death, but the strength

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of Lawless’s performance and the popularity with fans persuaded the producers that she was a strong-enough character to hang a spin-off around. In the end, Xena lasted more episodes than Hercules and remains popular with fans today. In 1998, Morreale suggested that Xena was ‘notable as one of the first television series to place a woman in the role of the archetypal hero on a quest’ (Morreale, 1998, p. 79), while Inness (1999) went further proposing that Xena marked a step change in the representation of tough women on a mainstream show. The tone and style of Xena were playful and intertextual, with the likes of A Solstice Carol (2.9) managing to reference Victorian Christmases, Charles Dickens and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (Ken Hughes, 1968) while still set in a supposedly ancient Greece (with Rome, China and Japan also appearing at various points over the six seasons). The following episode The Xena Scrolls (2.10) introduced a self-referential element, leaping forward to the 1940s in an Indiana Jones style archaeology storyline that culminated in a descendent of Joxer (Ted Raimi) taking the discovered ‘Xena scrolls’ to a television producer. A theme picked up again in the penultimate story of the show in Soul Possession (6.20) when a contemporary archaeologist discovers a new Xena scroll and various characters have been reincarnated. Xena Warrior Princess is a truly polysemic text, a riot of crosscultural references, nonlinear alternate timelines, where death is a mild inconvenience, body swapping and magic of all flavours regular occurrences. It was ‘a vast and detailed narrative space’ (Hills, 2002, p. 137) where as many stories were suggested as told. The show was certainly groundbreaking, but there were also rather familiar ways in which the narrative acted to constrain Xena: her on-screen presentation, the role of men and the ‘punished for sex/love’ narrative trope. The finale of the series also raises some questions. To begin with the name of the show itself, ‘Warrior Princess’ is a title given to Xena from her first appearance in Hercules, but it is a strange title. There is no doubt Xena is a warrior. In the early days, she in fact, was a warlord leader of an army, but it is never suggested that she is descended from royalty, although there is some debate around the identity of her father. There is no corresponding discussion about the identity of her mother however who ran a tavern. The connection in popular culture with Disney princesses and other ‘pink’ examples of corporate girl culture has given ‘princess’ a bad name, but nonetheless Margoulick points out that ‘princess is a diminutive, less powerful, less threatening, and very feminine kind of female leader as opposed to “queen,” the title one might expect for someone of Xena’s stature, accomplishments, and position in her world’ (Margoulick, 2006, p. 744). Some fans suggested that she is the ‘princess of war’ but could not be styled the ‘Queen of War’ because it would

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be too close to Ares’ title as the ‘King of War’ (‘[Xena: Warrior Princess] ‘What exactly is Xena the princess of?’, 2015) which is as good an explanation as any. In fact, Xena’s companion, Gabrielle gains more of right to such a title when in Hooves and Harlots (1.10) she tries to save an Amazon and receives her ‘right of caste’ in return, which turns out to include Amazon royal connections. Towards the end of the episode, the writer Gabrielle points out to Xena, ‘You’re a warrior princess, and I’m an Amazon princess. That’s gonna make such a great story.’ Another point, and one which we return to often, is the question of costume and make-up. As noted earlier, Xena had what Inness dubbed ‘indestructible beauty’ but Morreale went further, pointing out that ‘Xena is feminised by the look of the camera. Her “masculine” leather suit is cut to reveal her ample cleavage, and it is not unusual for the camera to linger on her legs’ (Morreale, 1998, p. 81). Thus the shooting style of the show worked to keep in check the autonomy of Xena as a character and render her palatable for a male audience, although the lesbian subtext of Xena also appears to have rendered her attractive to at least sections of the female audience as well, with Entertainment Weekly reporting on the popularity of ‘Xena Night’ at Meow Mix, a New York lesbian bar (Flaherty, 1997). Xena looks tough and she is complex, but like the other characters in this chapter, there is an element of masculine control present in the narrative and Xena’s male lovers are pivotal in extreme changes of direction for the character. Ten years before the main narrative of the show, and told in flashback in Destiny (2.12) during a period where Xena tries to defend her home from marauding hordes, she encounters a young Julius Caesar. Xena, bored with her current efforts to defend her homeland from external foes, took the charismatic Caesar captive, but the results for Xena were disastrous. Her attraction to Caesar results in torture that turns her to the dark side. In fact, Kennedy (2007), delving deeper into the imagery the show uses to present this back story, points out that Caesar does not just try to kill Xena, but crucifies her thus marking her body as that of a conquered slave. Xena is only saved by the intervention of M’lila (Ebonie Smith), one of a variety of female helpers that Xena encounters in the course of her adventures. Sometime later, Xena encounters Hercules, who ‘romances and reforms Xena before sending her off to do good deeds as a champion in her own right – thus making her’ (Margoulick, 2006, p. 730), or, as I would argue, re-making her once more. The two major turning points in her character’s narrative trajectory are created by her encounters with men who are her lovers. The ‘punished for sex/love’ narrative trope is a clear one in Xena. There is a great deal of violence. ‘Eventually’, says one writer, ‘we see Xena in emotional

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and physical combat with virtually everyone important in her life, including most of her love interests’ (Margoulick, 2006, p. 736). However, at least the punishment is sometimes meted out to her lovers rather than to Xena herself. Although mostly told in flashback stories, Xena’s male lovers all seem to have come to an early demise usually as a result of meeting Xena. Petracles (Peter Daube) was Xena’s betrothed, who turns up in A Fistful of Dinars (1.14). He had sex with the young Xena but then jilted her. He tries to seduce Gabrielle but then gets killed. Marcus (Bobby Hosea), a lover from her warlord days, appears in The Path Not Taken (1.5) when Xena is trying to rescue a kidnapped girl but dies with an arrow in his chest trying to help Xena. Borias (Marton Csokas) also dates from the ‘bad old days’. He betrays Xena twice and dies in battle. He is the father of one of her children. However, for most fans, Xena’s relationship with Gabrielle was really the central and longest-lasting romantic attachment in the show, although in the text, the exact nature of their relationship is never revealed. In Callisto (1.22) for example, there is a tender and intimate scene between Gabrielle and Xena (see Figure 10). In a series of tightly framed close-ups of Xena and two shots of Xena

Figure 10  A tender moment as Gabrielle extracts a promise from Xena. Xena: Warrior Princess, Callisto (1.22).

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and Gabrielle, with out-of-focus flames from the campfire in the foreground creating a soft heat haze, Xena speaks of the difficulty of breaking the cycle of violence and revenge. She goes on to say that if anything happened to her mother, Gabrielle, or Hercules, she didn’t know what she might do. Gabrielle empathizes but makes her promise that she won’t become a monster. Eventually Xena promises, and after an awkward one armed, over the shoulder embrace; Gabrielle tries to wipe a tear from Xena’s cheek, though Xena shakes her off. The scene ends with Gabrielle resting her cheek on Xena’s bare shoulder. It is their physical proximity and touching that make the scene so intimate – this is not something we see them do very often, at least in the earlier series, but it is the sort of scene that makes the queer subtext seem a lot less ‘subtext-y’. By the final episode, A Friend in Need Part 2 (6.22) things are a bit clearer. Gabrielle takes a drink from the Fountain of Strength and then dribbles a few drops of water into Xena’s mouth to revive her – a kiss that Lawless referred to in a 2003 interview. There was always a ‘well, she might be or she might not be’ but when there was that drip of water passing between their lips in the final scene, that cemented it for me … Now it wasn’t just that Xena was bisexual and kinda like her gal pal and they kind of fooled around sometimes, it was ‘Nope, they’re married, man’. (Medigovich, 2003)

On 13th February 2018, Lawless tweeted a famously sensual picture of Xena and Gabrielle sharing a bath from A Day in the Life (2.15), with the greeting ‘Happy Galentine’s Day’ in reference to a popular lesbian alternative to Valentine’s Day. The case, at least as far as Lawless is concerned, is closed. It is interesting that although there are important lesbian characters in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Wynonna Earp, Xena is the only warrior heroine who is herself at least bisexual (with a notable exception being the also bisexual Bo (Anna Silk) in Lost Girl, (Showcase, 2010–16)). However, the primacy of the Xena/Gabrielle relationship makes the two-part series finale all the more puzzling. The ending was not a cliffhanger like Sapphire & Steel but instead, more like The X-Files, it hit such a sour note that many fans subsequently worked to ‘correct’ it, thus keeping the text alive. In a typically convoluted final flashback story in A Friend in Need Parts 1 and 2 (6.21 & 22), Xena is called to Jappa by a ghost of a girl that she rescued from being kidnapped forty years previously. Akemi believed in Xena’s capacity for good, and insisted on being her protégé, but Akemi herself was intent on revenge and kills her father who was responsible for her kidnap and for other deaths. Her father returns as a soul eating demon and Akemi calls

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on Xena to help kill him (again). In order to do this, Xena must die so she can fight Yodoshi in the spirit realm, and Xena chooses death on the battlefield, peppered by arrows, before seeking a final showdown with the demon. Xena is successful in defeating Yodoshi and the souls he has swallowed are released, including Akemi. This is not the first time that Xena (or indeed Gabrielle) has died, but although Gabrielle has been told how she can revive Xena, this time, Xena explains, she must stay dead so that the souls can remain free, a decision that was controversial to say the least. ‘Fans and scholars alike were critical of what seemed to be significant plot inconsistencies which led to Xena’s decision to accept her death’s illogical premise’ (Kennedy, 2007, p. 325). As one fan lamented many years after the show had ended, ‘Look, Xena defeated gods and goddesses, and she deserved an ending that was as strong as she was, not some rom-com ending about how she would always be with Gabrielle. … if anyone deserved to go out with a bang – dead or alive – it was Xena the freakin’ warrior princess’ (Highfill, 2014). In fact, the ending really only makes sense, if one radically alters the usual frame of analysis for the show and sees Gabrielle as the hero in training on a quest to self-mastery. In this context, Xena becomes the old master trying to pass on her wisdom, knowledge and skills to her successor, who chooses to die to allow her protégé to carry the flame forward. Early in A Friend in Need Part 1, while travelling by boat to Jappa, Gabrielle is shown sparring with a young monk where the camera lingers on her muscles. Then, on arriving, during the first battle to save a town from burning, Xena asks Gabrielle ‘what would you do’ and Gabrielle points out the water tower and thereafter seems to lead the action towards the tower and save the town. Later on, Xena teaches her the ‘pinch’ and to ‘listen to what is behind the sounds’ as Akemi had taught her, and just before Gabrielle sets off to find Xena’s body and begin her attempt to revive her, the already-dead Xena and Akemi tattoo a design on Gabrielle’s back which will protect her against the demon Yodoshi. It is an eroticized scene with more than a hint of S&M in its presentation. Later Gabrielle carries the chakram, a circular blade that was Xena’s special weapon, and looks masterful as she seeks Xena’s body from the warlord samurai and fights him for Xena’s head. Gabrielle has become pretty kickass herself. In the final scenes, she sails off into the sunset with a ghostly Xena at her side, seeming very much the new warrior princess, though the fans struggled a bit with the apparently sudden retconning switch from seeing Xena as the hero on a quest to understanding Gabrielle as the one (Armstrong, 2001).

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Like so many of Cult TV series, there have been persistent rumours of a reboot, with a new actress to play Xena. In 2016, NBC went so far as to announce plans with Javier Grillo-Marxuach in place as showrunner, but by summer 2017 these had been shelved, seemingly with the relationship between Xena and Gabrielle as the deal breaker. As Grillo-Marxuach said in March 2016, ‘There is no reason to bring back Xena if it is not there for the purpose of fully exploring a relationship that could only be shown subtextually in first-run syndication in the 1990s’ (Wigler, 2016). However, the exuberance of the original text, with its ‘everything including the kitchen sink’ approach to mythological tropes and narrative nooks and crannies, meant there were more than enough fissures for audiences to inhabit as studies such as Caudill in Early & Kennedy (2003), Stanfill (2013) and Hanmer (2014) have shown.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (20th Century Fox, 1997–2003) Only two years after Xena’s journeys began, another warrior was ready to join her on the TV screens. Unlike Wonder Woman and Xena, Buffy Summers was a home-grown American girl who lived in a picturesque Californian town called Sunnydale, a town unfortunately also built on a Hellmouth, thus infested with vampires and demons. Buffy was a pretty blonde cheerleader, a typical High School girl, but she was also the Chosen One, and as the Season 1 prologue proclaimed, ‘She alone will stand against the vampires, the demons and the forces of darkness. She is the Slayer.’ Buffy fought monsters of all kinds, saved the world from apocalypse several times and died more than once along the way. The show told the story of Buffy’s coming of age and eventual emancipation. For all its eventual success, Buffy had an unpromising start. The movie Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Fran Rubel Kuzui, 1992) had been written by Joss Whedon (who eventually became the showrunner of the TV version), but the film had suffered from changes during the production process and in the end did not do well at the box office. It seemed destined to be forgotten about, but Gail Berman a producer who had read the original script (and subsequently owned the rights to the movie) thought it had great potential as a TV series (Porreca, 2017). Berman began working with Whedon to pitch it, but it was a tough sell. As Berman pointed out in the same interview, they began the process before Xena had launched, and it was not until the still relatively new station The WB decided to take a chance with a half season in mid-1997 that Buffy was re-launched. Berman went on to executive produce both Buffy and its spin-off Angel (20th

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Century Fox Television, 1999–2004). The Hollywood Reporter’s review of the first episode was not gushing, but noted the ‘witty wisecracks make it easy to buy into the frolic of kids and their teacher mentor secretly fighting the forces of the undead’ (Farkash, 1997/2015). The viewing figures however told a different story with Variety reporting that ‘the two-hour premiere … scared up the best Monday overnights in WB history’ (Bierbaum, 1997) and the show eventually ran for seven seasons and continues to own a powerful place in the Cult TV canon. According to one writer, Buffy the Vampire Slayer ‘entirely upended the tale of the vampire’ (Williamson, 2010, p. 60) because the power to defeat vampires was no longer the possession of a patriarchal figure like Van Helsing, as in the novel Dracula (Bram Stoker, 1897), but is instead invested in a sixteen-year-old girl. At first Buffy seems very much under the direction of her mentor Mr Giles (Anthony Stewart Head), a member of the Watcher’s Council whose role in the life of the Chosen One is gradually revealed, but slowly Buffy begins to make her own decisions, and the show became one of a very few to allow its heroine to fully identify the powers that control her and then eventually emancipate herself. Along the way, Buffy’s obstacles came in three forms: internal, personal relationships and institutional control. As we saw in Chapter 3, it seems that every heroine must go through a moment of trying to give up her power and Buffy is no exception. The pull towards ‘normality’ is a strong one, even though so often normal seems to mean powerlessness. In Episode 2.9, Buffy has such a moment. She tells Angel, ‘I want a normal life, like I had before’, and she is tempted to hand it all over to Kendra, an ‘alternate’ Slayer, and run away to Disneyland and in fact does so, more or less. Although in Anne (3.1), having left Sunnydale, and found work as a diner waitress in Los Angeles, Buffy eventually decides that she must return to the Hellmouth and take up her slaying duties once more. In Season 6, however, the same issues arise and Buffy only seems to be happy when invisible in Gone (6.11) or in Normal Again (6.17) thinking she’s a schizophrenic in a mental institution. These are the internal obstacles that Buffy, like many heroines, must overcome, and sometimes overcome again, in order to fulfil her role as the hero who can save the world. In Season 7, in a radical move, both in terms of the narrative of the show and in terms of how such hero’s stories usually play out, Buffy has the idea to free the power of all the potential slayers in order to take on the might of the First Evil, meaning she is no longer the only Chosen One. In the end, Buffy does not give up nor just endure her power, but actually shares it. Such heroic largesse is rare.

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However, for Buffy, personal relationships form a bleaker picture, and the ‘punished for sex/love’ narrative trope is particularly pronounced. Her first human sexual encounter was with Parker Abrams (Adam Kaufman), a fellow college student in Season 4 who turned out to be a serial seducer who immediately dumps her, leaving Buffy to wonder if all men turn evil when you sleep with them and that she’s repulsive. Later in Season 4, things look more promising with the entirely human Riley Finn (Marc Blucas), although he is also a drugged up ‘super soldier’ working for the government backed Initiative, but Buffy starts dating him. In Where the Wild Things Are (4.18) however, their energetic sex releases poltergeists which nearly kill them and the Scooby Gang, as Buffy’s group of friends are known. Subsequently however Riley must stop the treatment that is making him extra strong, and as he becomes normal again he finds it hard to cope with Buffy’s continued strength and begins to seek out female vampires to suck his blood, before eventually deciding leave Sunnydale for his own sanity, though he remains an ally. But without doubt Buffy’s two most important relationships are with vampires, both of whom are sometimes allies, but are also at times homicidal. The first is Angel (David Boreanaz), a major character in the first three seasons of the show. Angel was a different sort of vampire: a vampire with a soul. Angel had been cursed by gypsies who gave him back a conscience to punish him for his crimes, and so Angel is a vampire with the capacity to feel his victim’s anguish. ‘For a hundred years’, he eventually tells Buffy, ‘I offered an ugly death to everyone I met’ (1.7) but by the time Buffy first encounters him he is seeking to expiate his sins by protecting and helping the Slayer. Angel is mysterious, enigmatic and distant and Buffy is drawn to this calm and collected character who possesses the ultimate sangfroid. Buffy refers to him in What’s My Line Part 1 (2.9) as her ‘cradle robbing, creature of the night boyfriend’ and they eventually consummate their relationship. Unfortunately this has a catastrophic effect on Angel who is so happy that the curse that gave him a soul is lifted and the psychopathic, conscience-free vampire returns. He proceeds to torment Buffy and her companions until Buffy is forced to kill him. Angel eventually reappears in Season 3 when he is expelled from hell, though in a feral state, and although Buffy gradually helps him back to sanity and humanity, they both know they cannot remain together as lovers. Without doubt, Angel is the big romantic storyline of the first few seasons, but Buffy’s relationship with her second vampire lover Spike (James Marsters) also merits special attention, because for the first time the choice to end the relationship is her own. Spike who was a guest star in the early seasons became

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a regular from Season 4 onwards. In contrast to Angel, Spike is very much a vampire without a soul and, along with his vampire girlfriend Drusilla (Juliet Landau), he is an enemy of Buffy, but Buffy’s relationship with Spike was never entirely straightforward and somehow, Buffy puts up with him being around and Spike in return finds himself helping her. In Season 2, Spike helps to kill Angel. In Season 4 a potential attraction between Spike and Buffy is hinted at in the episode Something Blue where, under the influence of one of Willow’s spells, the two become engaged (see Figure 11). In Season 5’s Fool for Love, he tells her how he killed two other slayers but rather than threatening her, it helps Buffy to understand herself. Later in Season 5, Spike admits that he is in love with Buffy and endures torture from a hell dimension god in order to help her. In return, almost despite herself, Buffy treats Spike as a human being. ‘If I would just stop saving his life’, she complains in Tabula Rasa (6.8), ‘it would simple things up so much’. Across Season 6 Spike becomes much more important to Buffy who had died at the end of Season 5, sacrificing herself to stop an apocalypse. Willow’s magic revives her but she has no one to confide in except Spike who is always hanging around. It is Spike who recognizes that the injuries on Buffy’s hands come from digging her way out of her grave, because he has done it too. In her depressed state, Spike seems to come into his own as her confidante, because he

Figure 11  Under the influence of a spell, Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and Spike (James Marsters) start planning their wedding. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Something Blue (4.9).

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is not interested in anything except Buffy. He is someone to whom she can admit her darker side because as Spike sings in the musical episode Once More with Feeling (6.7), ‘Whisper in a dead man’s ear, doesn’t make it real.’ Eventually in Smashed (6.9), Buffy takes her sexual pleasure from Spike with sado-masochistic abandon. Buffy is not quite so immediately narratively punished for having sex with Spike as with Angel, but she is still punished. Angel’s relationship with Buffy was obviously romantic, but Spike’s position in the narrative is more complicated. He could be seen as a personification of the ‘self hater’ in patriarchal society, where those characteristics designated ‘male’ such as intellectual or thinking attributes are awarded a higher value than those designated ‘female’ such as emotional or feeling attributes. For women, argues Wehr (1988, p. 18), this can become internalized as a self-hater – an inner voice which says ‘try harder’, ‘do more’, ‘not good enough’, which one might sum up as ‘not male enough’. In many ways, Spike represents this to Buffy. As she beats him up in Dead Things (6.13), she screams at him ‘I’m not your girl. You don’t have a soul. There is nothing good or clean in you. You are dead inside. You can’t feel anything. I could never be your girl’, but she seems to be attacking herself more than Spike. Spike provokes extreme feelings for Buffy, but he also imposes reflection upon her, and in time he forces her to react to her situation in a different way. Buffy has tried to physically grapple with him many times – her default reaction as the Slayer is to physically attack. But in order to deal with Spike, Buffy must step away from action and step away from the warrior who solves every situation with violence and eventually confronts Spike, not with fists, but with a decision. ‘I do want you’, she tells him, ‘Being with you makes things simpler for a little while … I’m using you. I can’t love you. I’m just being weak and selfish. And it’s killing me. I have to be strong about this. I’m sorry, William.’ Unfortunately, however, this is not the end of the narrative sequence. In Seeing Red (6.19), in a terrible attempt to change Buffy’s mind, Spike tries to rape her. With its different kind of violence and violation of intimacy, it is a scene that still shocks fans, as evident in a number of ‘watch along’ reaction videos on YouTube (such as After Show Reactions, 2018), and it can be seen as another version of the ‘narrative snap’ that heroines so often encounter after a display of autonomy. In this case, it is the decision to end an unhealthy relationship that results in punishment. Crosby (2004) suggests that the catastrophic events towards the end of Season 6 is as a result of Buffy’s defiance of the Council in Season 5, which we will discuss in more detail below, but I would argue that there is a more immediate connection between Buffy asserting her autonomy from Spike and disaster.

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The damage to Buffy’s immediate ‘family’ is extreme – Buffy herself is shot; Tara, Willow’s girlfriend, is killed; Willow becomes a magic junkie and then a monster; Anya is jilted and reverts to her vengeance demon ways; and Dawn (Buffy’s sister) becomes a kleptomaniac. Spike, on the other hand, is not really punished for the attempted rape. Instead, it proves the catalyst for Spike’s own inadvertent journey towards redemption. He goes on a quest to be made ‘what he was’ in order to ‘take care’ of Buffy’ and in Grave (6.22) he endures a series of demon trials to have his wish granted. He is not asking for the return of his soul, but instead wants his remorse-free vampire self back, but the demon tricks him and gives him back his soul so it could be argued that Spike is rewarded rather than punished for the attempted rape. Buffy, on the other hand, begins Season 7 with her Scooby Gang community in tatters and faced with her most dangerous opponent, the First Evil. Spike eventually returns in Season 7 and becomes Buffy’s cheerleader and advocate. In Touched (7.20) Spike is horrified to discover the Scooby Gang have lost confidence in Buffy’s leadership and driven her away and he rails against them, before going to find Buffy and encouraging her to keep going. ‘I’m not asking you for anything’, he says to her. ‘I’ve seen the best and the worst of you. And I understand with perfect clarity exactly what you are: you’re a hell of a woman. You’re the one, Buffy.’ So in choosing to step away from a destructive relationship with Spike, Buffy is paradoxically driven by the narrative away from the Scooby Gang and back towards Spike as her only source of comfort and support, but the relationship between Buffy and Spike perhaps extends beyond the more obvious ‘punished for sex/love’ narrative trope, working towards a more complex outcome in the final analysis, as Spike sacrifices himself to help the slayers, but it remains a complex and unsettling part of Buffy’s story. The final obstacle for Buffy to overcome is the institutional control of the Council of Watchers, descendants of the group of men who created the Slayers in the first place. At first these are represented by Rupert Giles, ostensibly the school librarian but really a member of the Council. We will come back to the Council itself below, but Giles, as he is known, is Buffy’s personal watcher, a paternal figure. Giles’s day job is that of school librarian, the keeper of knowledge, and it is often his research and understanding that provide the necessary clue that allows Buffy to triumph but he does hold information back, and, at least initially, he does not tell her much about the Council, whose control becomes ever more constricting. Eventually in Season 6 he decides that Buffy is too reliant on him as a father figure and he leaves Sunnydale, though he does later return to help.

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The power of the Council of Watchers is the controlling power behind the throne of the Slayer who regard Buffy only as their tool. They are the descendants of the Shadow Men, those who created the first Slayer. As one of them explains in Checkpoint (5.12), ‘The Council fights evil. The Slayer is the instrument with which we fight. The Council remains. The Slayers … change. It’s been that way from the beginning.’ The Council do not like Buffy’s free spirited ways, and at first attempt to control her through Giles. When he proves his loyalty to Buffy is demonstrably stronger than his loyalty to the Council, he is fired (3.12) and replaced by another Watcher more amenable to the Council’s direction. In the middle of Season 5 things come to a head when the Council see a chance to control Buffy once more by offering her information about the threat she is currently facing if Buffy proves herself ‘worthy’ by agreeing to undergo a series of trials. Buffy eventually figures out where the balance of power really lies and, after refusing to participate in any further reviews, demands answers, which she then gets. It is a powerful moment, where Buffy realizes that if she is the Council’s weapon, then they can do little without her and their power is significantly diminished. However Season 7 went even further when Buffy eventually discovers the role of the Council in creating the Slayer in the first place and the fates of all the generations of girls who have died in that role. She utilizes Willow’s power to break the Council’s hold on the slayer and all the potential slayers who exist, empowering them all. They are able to work together to end the threat of the First Evil and the series ends with Buffy able to head off into the sunset no longer alone with the burden of being the Chosen One. Buffy, the warrior woman, survives her own internal doubts and desires to give up responsibility and power and is able to act; she survives a series of ambivalent lovers to become more independent; and she more than survives the institutional control of the Watchers. In the end she breaks their control over her and over all slayers present and future. It is a radical ending for the warrior woman and one that still has not been much replicated even so many years later. After the finale of the TV series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer lived on in comic book form through Dark Horse Comics. It is worth mentioning here because the comic book stories are considered ‘canon’ since they were created with the participation of Joss Whedon who essentially worked as showrunner to the comic book stories, also on occasion as writer. Some writers of the TV show such as Jane Espenson also contributed and, in fact, the stories themselves were badged as Seasons 8 to 12, directly following on from the TV series. The final Season 12 four-part Buffy: The Reckoning was written by Joss Whedon and

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published in September 2018 to mixed views from fans, but is, at least for now, the final story for Buffy. In it, Buffy is on her way to becoming a police officer in a supernatural division, with the future for slayers secured. The move to create a finale for the comic book series came as news that Dark Horse’s licence for the Buffy characters was over. In the summer of 2018, 21st Century Fox was taken over by Disney, and, as they had done with the acquisition of Lucas Film and its Star Wars characters in 2012, began to pull intellectual property (such as rights to the Buffy characters) back in-house. We can see here the influence of the external industry context on a Cult text quite directly where Disney see Buffy as a product with potential for further sales. The final ending for Buffy herself, however, set the stage for a planned Buffy reboot, with Monica Owusu-Breen in post as showrunner and Whedon ‘co-developing’. News of the reboot however caused such disquiet amongst a still active fan base that in July 2018 Owusu-Breen took the unusual step of Tweeting the reassurance that the show was not a reboot as such but more of a sequel centred on a new Slayer: ‘Here we are, twenty years later … And the world seems a lot scarier. So maybe it could be time to meet a new Slayer … And that’s all I can say’ (Owusu-Breen, 2018). There are many nooks and crannies of the Buffyverse that fans are still exploring as the activity on various wikis, and fan fiction sites attest, which has given rise to extensive academic interest, such as the online journal Slayage: The Journal of Whedon Studies. Like Xena, Buffy has inspired art, craft, fan fiction, cosplay, re-watching and reaction videos and the whole panoply of fan activities. Fanlore.org has made a fair attempt at capturing the variety of activity and the headlines including an extensive list of other archives. As a character who struggled through internal self-doubt and external attempts to control her, Buffy’s humour, intelligence and self-awareness seem to have encouraged and inspired audiences of all ages and backgrounds to engage with her story. Perhaps the attraction of Buffy is that fans could mature with her. Her speech to Angel in the final episode Chosen (7.22) where she likens herself to cookie dough that’s ‘not done baking yet’ seems to draw particular praise as one fan commented on a YouTube video clip, ‘This is the moment where my heroine had grown up. Love this scene’ (Rapoport, 2014). There is also ‘voiceover’ at the end of the final Buffy comic story The Reckoning from Buffy herself which is worth quoting in full since it is, at least for now, the final word. Spoken over frames of her comforting both Spike and Angel, she says: And what am I going to do now? Seems like my world’s always been changing so fast it makes my head spin. Cheerleader to Slayer. Slayer to General. General to nobody. Girl to Woman. If there’s ever been a time I could kick back, give it

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all up, it’s now. Monsters at a low, Slayers at an all time high. And I can definitely give myself a break. But the quiet life … I’m not sure that’s me. There’s always going to be something that needs fixing. Someone who needs help. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to just ignore that. And because I had to go and change the future, more so than ever, I have absolutely no idea what’s coming. The trouble with changing the world is … worth it (Whedon et al., 2018).

And the final frame shows a party, celebrating Buffy and Faith’s time at the police academy with all the Scooby Gang present: a celebration of Buffy of course, but also of the success of their collective.

Wynonna Earp (Syfy, 2016–2021) Despite debuting over a decade after Buffy concluded on television, Wynonna Earp seems to be following in the Slayer’s footsteps. Perhaps best described as a supernatural Western, Wynonna Earp tells the story of Wyatt Earp’s heir, who must try to rid the town of Purgatory of seventy-seven revenants, those whom Wyatt killed, but there’s a catch. Every time the heir dies, the Revenants are resurrected. Twenty-seven-year-old Wynonna (Melanie Scrofano) is the latest heir determined to be the one to end the curse, with help from her sister Waverly (Dominique Provost-Chalkley) and a gang of unlikely helpers from Doc Holliday himself (Tim Rozon) to Sherriff ’s Officer Nicole Haught (Katherine Barrell). Wynonna Earp is based on a comic book created by Beau Smith in 1996 and published by Image Comics/IDW, and its comic book origins can be seen in the bright primary colours, strong angles, often expressionist lighting, and in the mise en scène which features clean lines and spare detail. The wintery rural landscapes give the look of the show a timeless fairy tale purity. In 2013 IDW expanded its interests beyond comic publication and began to fund, develop and produce television series based on IDW books. With Emily Andras on board as executive producer and showrunner, Wynonna Earp debuted on the Syfy channel in 2016 and concluded with a fourth and final season in 2021. It gathered fans quickly, and popular appearances at the likes of the San Diego Comic Con (a must for any show looking for its special fan base these days) meant specific Wynonna Earp fan conventions were also quick off the ground. EarperCon UK held the first convention in 2017, with a second in 2018, and in the United States the first convention was Earpapalooza in Minneapolis, Earper Homestead Convention in Canada, with Earp Expo in New Orleans in 2019. It takes a high degree of fan dedication and commitment

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to host a convention, but the cast and crew rewarded it by making appearances. The relationship between the show and the fans seems to be a particularly close one, with Andras tweeting during Season 3, ‘When I can’t sleep, I think of all the Earpers all over the world spreading kindness and tolerance but still making jokes and being self-deprecating and fun and I’m like, it’s all gonna be ok, and that is the delightful surprise gift of all this and I close my eyes and drift off ’ (Andras, 2018). A close relationship with fans can have high stakes for a Cult TV show, as Yanders (2018) points out, but the Wynonna Earp team worked hard to carefully balance involving the fans whilst maintaining creative control. In an interview just after the premiere, Andras pointed out some of the differences with the comic book version, saying Wynonna was ‘very witty and funny and right off the bat I knew she was an extraordinary heroine, but she’s also a product of her time, which is the early ’90s. So [in the comic] she’s a very buxom blonde fighting werewolves in band-aids over her breasts’ (Reid, 2016). Andras, who had previously executive produced another fantasy show Lost Girl for Syfy, was interested in a more realistic portrayal of a central female protagonist. In an interview from 2016 she said, ‘With Wynonna, it was really critical to me that she was a woman that we, as women, recognize. That sounds so basic and so simple, but I actually don’t think you see a lot of that on television’ (Logan, 2016). So Wynonna is good at fighting, but also dislikes getting caught in cobwebs or spider-like creatures invading the office, both of which happen in Shed Your Skin (2.2). Although the first few episodes suggests Wynonna is walking in the same traumatized footsteps as Jessica Jones, as her back story includes her killing her father (by accidentally shooting him), losing her sister who is taken by a gang of revenants, and then entering the care system to be systematically brutalized. However, the show quickly developed a more light-hearted tone, in common with The Avengers or Buffy, although the show does not minimize the trauma so much as use repartee to express it. The writers of the show, under Andras’s direction, seem to have a clear understanding of what is at stake for women beyond the confines of the show itself. As Andras put it, ‘I didn’t just want to make her some dude’s idea of a broken woman. I wanted her to feel like a real person’ (Logan, 2016). So in returning to the narrative tropes that have been common to the warrior women so far, there are some interesting variations in Wynonna Earp. To begin with the appearance of Wynonna, as noted earlier, she tends towards jeans and leather jackets, with sensible boots as footwear, but the show has some fun with the performance of traditional femininity from time to time, and the

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writers have Wynonna putting it on and taking it off as required, while not being afraid of pointing out the constricting and inhibiting aspects of feminine attire which can be downright dangerous. In I Walk the Line (1.13), for example, having been to ‘the ball’ in a beautiful red dress, Wynonna returns to the Earp Homestead looking for her sisters. She arrives through the door kicking off her high heels in annoyance with a moan of pain and an exasperated ‘Shitty shoes!’ acknowledging that high heels and fighting do not combine well. Later in the same scene, she is trying to wrestle off the red dress (which like many is really designed to be zipped and unzipped by someone else) in an inelegant but realistic way – over her head with both arms still stuck in the arm holes – when one of the poisoned townsfolk enters the house and begins to attack her. She manages to wriggle free and whilst threatening him with her high-heeled shoe, Waverly returns and hits him over the head with a frying pan – feminine domesticity strikes back. In fact, dressing up for parties in especially feminine clothing is an interesting trope in Wynonna, as often the choice of clothing for these occasions is not entirely her own. In Season 1, Wynonna has an exchange with Agent Dolls (Shamier Anderson) over the fact he is trying to supply her with a dress for the party. When he explains her that the dress he has brought has no special additions (camera, bullet proof) as she assumes, she snaps, ‘I can bring my own damn dress’ (1.12). At the start of Season 3, Jeremy (Varun Saranga), the science geek who joined them in Season 2, has dressed an unconscious Wynonna in a tight fitting black dress for a party in honour of the vampires who have taken over the town (3.1). By the end of the episode she is halfway down a cliff face and freezing to death after a car crash where party clothes are definitely not an advantage. At the end of Season 3, Wynonna has been taken prisoner by a group of revenants who curl her hair and dress her in the nineteenth-century dress of someone’s dead wife, complete with lace décolletage, corset and bustle, in order to make her suitable ‘tribute’ to the demon Bulshar (Jean Marchand). Later in the episode, after she has been placed in a cage, she takes great pleasure in ripping it all off before escaping the cage, having turned most of the revenants against Bulshar. For Wynonna, traditional feminine garb seems to signal males trying to make choices on her behalf, which in turn leads to grave danger. Waverly is the more traditionally feminine of the sisters, often seen dressed up and enjoying outfits, such as in Gonna Getcha Good (2.3) where she puts on her old cheerleader’s uniform and dances for Nicole. As Waverly quips in No Future in the Past (2.8), ‘I’m the nicest person in Purgatory. There was a vote. I got a sash.’ It is interesting from a mise en scène perspective that we see

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Waverly’s bedroom at the homestead as the location of many scenes, with its pastel colours and intimations of girl’s culture, but rarely Wynonna’s. Waverly also discovers she is bisexual in Season 1, as she breaks up with Champ (Dylan Koroll), the stereotypical jock boyfriend from High School, and embarks on a relationship with Nicole Haught, despite having joined Wynonna in admiring both Dolls and Holliday at various points. Waverly, however, also reveals that she has done research on the family curse and learned lots of dead languages in online courses, meaning that Waverly is far from just a congenial pretty face. Female relationships of many varieties are celebrated in the show. Unlike Wonder Woman and The Bionic Woman who have few interactions with friendly females at all, or Buffy and Xena who have some friends although they cannot always be relied upon, Wynonna has a much wider variety of female companions. In fact, rather than a heterosexual romance, the sisters Wynonna and Waverly form the foundational relationship upon which the show is built. The relationship is taken seriously and is portrayed as something to be protected and cherished, though at the same time it manages to capture the sometimes intense envy and frustration that can also form part of sibling relationships, particularly revealed when Willa (Natalie Krill) the oldest sister returns or when the demon Jolene (Zoie Palmer) in an episode of the same name (3.5) takes over the homestead with cupcakes and poisonous whispers. Other female characters have also become fan favourites, such as the Season 2 introduction of Mercedes Gardner (Dani Kind), an old school friend of Wynonna who is tough talking, not very ‘nice’ when speaking her mind, but who also admits that she digs Wynonna’s whole ‘punch first, ask questions never vibe’ and even kind of loves her (3.11). In Season 3, although she has seized the ‘apocalatunity’ as she puts it, of becoming one of Bulshar’s wives, she nonetheless helps Wynonna escape a desperate situation, though without apology for having taken up Bulshar’s ‘offer’ in the first place. Season 2 also introduced Rosita (Tamara Duarte) the beautiful revenant bar maid who is also an ace chemist, rival for Doc’s affections and “frenemy” (friend-enemy) for Wynonna. Rosita helped Wynonna give birth in the season finale, but was thwarted in a plan to steal the baby. She returned in Holy War Part 1 (4.5) and although not fully reconciled, the two find a way to work together against their common enemy. Acknowledging the importance of female solidarity in the show, Andras has referred to the Western generic conventions within which the show is, in many ways, placed, describing it as … very patriarchal. You think about a lot of men running around with guns, there’s a certain brotherhood, a kind of one-upmanship. I was interested in flipping that on its head and making it all women running around, taking each

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other on, riding that line between good and evil, helping each other, at the same time maybe some of them being in contention, so the idea of sisters really appealed to me. (Logan, 2016)

The male revenants form an often undifferentiated background of menace to the show, with the exception of their leader Bobo del Rey (Michael Eklund), whilst the female villains are given more back story and (like the female monsters in Charmed) largely defined by their feminine desires. In Season 1, Constance, the Stone Witch (Rayisa Kondracki), is a grieving mother and in Constant Craving (1.6) Mama Olive is a cannibal mother in the basement who is fed victims by her revenant children. In Season 2 the sister wives of the demon Bulshar are determined to end their widowhood by resurrecting their husband, and in Season 4 ‘Mam’ Clanton (Paula Boudreau) is Wynonna’s most personal adversary, seeking revenge for the whole Clanton family against Wyatt’s heir. In terms of masculine control, it could be argued that as Wynonna is Wyatt’s heir, and her power comes from a male progenitor, but as the mythology of the show unfolds, it is revealed that Wyatt was first chosen to protect the earth by two angels, then cursed by the Stone Witch. The curse is inherited through the generations, but the power itself comes from a more heavenly direction, as it becomes clear once the Earp curse is broken, and Waverly’s angelic heritage is revealed at the end of Season 3. Although Wynonna of course remains a key protagonist in Season 4, it is Waverly’s transformation because of her angelic father that provides the dominant narrative thread. The show also sets out with another scenario familiar from many previous series already discussed, with Wynonna being forcibly co-opted to work for the Black Badge Division, a shadowy government organisation that deals with supernatural threats. As she begins to discover the parameters of her new situation, Agent Dolls is something of a mentor and a boss. What is interesting, however, is how quickly the authority of the BBD, as the characters call it, is diminished within the narrative. By the end of Season 1, Dolls has been captured by the BBD and the gang start Season 2 by rescuing him. BBD returns in Season 4 but as a diminished force that needs Wynonna to help contain the Ghost River Triangle, but eventually led by Jeremy, they are driven out once more, this time for good. Two common tropes are deconstructed in this show, with the origins of power and its control shifting from Wyatt to Wynonna to Waverly, but shifting in nature along the way. Wynonna is not a hero because of love, as Wonder Woman was, or turned to the good side by a male hero, as Xena was, or even significantly under the control of an external (male dominated) organisation as Buffy was. In fact, Wynonna manages, in Daddy Lessons (3.11), to persuade the remaining

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Figure 12  Wynonna (Melanie Scrofano) prepares to allow her former enemies onto Earp land. Wynonna Earp, War Paint (3.12).

revenants that they have a common enemy in Bulshar who was responsible for the curse in the first place and that they would be better off joining forces against him. She leads them back to the Earp Homestead and in an act of ‘good faith’ breaks the protections around the house so that they can enter. Wynonna does not just co-opt one or two revenants to her cause, as we might argue Buffy does with Angel and Spike, but instead for Wynonna the majority of her former enemies become her allies: a fresh take on the options for the warrior woman (see Figure 12). As well as offering an interesting range of female characters, the show also works hard to represent a range of male characters. Dolls is the most traditional: acerbic, focused, laconic and competent at his job. He is intent on making Wynonna shape up and face up to her new role. There is more than a hint of love triangle between Wynonna, Holliday and Dolls, but he is at first the company man, though he eventually turns against it and dies protecting Wynonna in Season 3. This is interesting because Doc Holliday is a character meant to be the Southern gentleman-cowboy from the nineteenth century and yet he is a more complex character than Dolls in his performance of masculinity. He continues to dress in a nineteenth-century fashion, complete with an old time moustache and a Gambler hat, which has Southern States connections, associated with the paddle steamer casinos of the Mississippi. At the same time, his costume is also up to date: his jeans have red selvedge turn-ups and his shirts are modern. In Season 1 there are several moments when the Earp sisters enjoy his masculine

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displays such as in Keeping the Home Fires Burning (1.2) where Doc is fixing the homestead mail box and forms the backdrop to a sisterly conversation round the campfire. At the same time, Doc is allowed to grieve over having to send their daughter away and in I Fall to Pieces (3.3) a grieving Wynonna is consoled by Doc. She is crying, but so is he. He wipes a tear from her cheek, and then she wipes one from his. Holliday is not completely closed off emotionally. However, Holliday, true to the historical character, is a reluctant member of the posse, constantly drifting in and out. As Wynonna says of him early in Season 1, ‘Not the enemy … not quite a friend?’ (1.2). He is a gambler and a womanizer, and his loyalties are often far from clear. He made a deal with the Stone Witch in Wyatt’s time for immortality and escape from his death from tuberculosis, but was then trapped at the bottom of a well, till Wynonna frees him, albeit by accident. He is immortal, but not a revenant. After Wynonna forces him to give up his immortality, in Season 3, he persuades his ex-wife who is now vampire to turn him to regain it. But like Spike and Buffy, in the final showdown with Bulshar, Doc helps Wynonna and ends the season setting off in search of the missing Waverly. The “punished for sex/love” trope is not played out in the same way: Doc is not entirely reliable, but neither is he the source of catastrophe. The relationship between Wynonna and Doc Holiday is not dissimilar to that of Buffy and Spike discussed earlier, but the aftermath of Diggin’ up Bones (1.5), where Wynonna and Doc give in to their attraction and make love, leads to another marked difference to some of the earlier warrior woman shows. In Season 2, Wynonna discovers that she is pregnant. This development was written into the show when lead actress Melanie Scrofano announced her own pregnancy. So throughout Season 2, Wynonna is pregnant, but it is treated in a fairly matter of fact way. Wynonna makes many ‘needing to pee’ gags, as well as vagina jokes, but at the same time she makes the point that she is pregnant not incapacitated. In fact, in Forever Mine, Never Mind (2.9) Wynonna is combat training with Waverly under Doll’s guidance and does a back flip! This is in marked contrast to pregnancies amongst other Cult TV heroines. Wonder Woman has no children, nor does Buffy (even in the comic book extension). In Stargate Atlantis Teyla (Rachel Luttrell) is removed from active duty because she is pregnant while Farscape’s Aeryn Sun eventually becomes the girlfriend of the central protagonist Crichton and mother of his child, but struggles with the role of mother. Xena has two children, but both are catastrophic. Her son was born in Xena’s ‘bad old days’ as Destroyer of Nations, but in a moment of maternal selflessness gives him up to the centaurs to raise. He is later killed by the demon daughter of Gabrielle in Season 3. Later, Xena has a daughter conceived by semi-

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mystical means in Fallen Angel (5.1). Xena’s former enemy Callisto impregnates Xena with her spirit and Eve is born as a reincarnation of Callisto becoming a brutal warrior. Although Wynonna’s pregnancy largely proceeds when she is in an enchanted sleep, and there is some drama around the birth itself, the pregnancy is not some great mystical event. After some confusion about exactly who the father is (in addition to Holliday there turns out to be a one nightstand revenant in the frame), Holliday is revealed as the father and baby Alice is sent out of the Ghost River Triangle for safety. Wynonna Earp is a fresh take on the warrior heroine, as tough as the others in this chapter, but much more self-aware. She is older than Buffy at the start (being twenty-seven to Buffy’s sixteen) and definitely more woman than girl. She has doubts about her abilities to be a successful heir, but throughout the course of Season 1, Wynonna makes a series of allies and begins to rebuild trust. Unlike Jessica Jones, discussed in the following chapter, Wynonna does not seem to find this an impossible task. Jessica’s allies remain on board despite her best efforts to dislodge them, whereas Wynonna seems to accept their help much more easily and expresses their value to her, especially Waverly. Wynonna, although cynical and hard-bitten by the abuse she suffered in the care system, is able to develop her allies and hang on to the ‘found family’ they have built together, even extending that trust to makes allies of the revenants themselves. Wynonna Earp offered a different trajectory for this warrior heroine. Wynonna was able to overcome her personal challenges to make allies of her enemies, celebrating her sister’s wedding, before riding off into the sunset with her lover Doc, in search of their daughter. These women warriors exist further out of the home than the witches of the previous chapter. They present images of a non-domestic form of femininity, moving outwards into the domain of men, and battle there on masculine terms. Sometimes they appear as ‘handmaidens of patriarchy’, channelling patriarchal values of strength, action and violence, but they also retain something of the feminine too. Some feminist scholars have also questioned the value of presenting a female hero (as opposed to a heroine) who is as competent and well versed in the ways of violence as the male hero. Helford for example said, ‘Stepping into the traditional role of hero seems a feminist triumph to many; however it also arguably masculinizes Xena, suggesting that for women to be heroic they must become in effect, men’ (Helford, 2000, p. 136). Kennedy (2007) also worried that the violence at the heart of heroism in the Western paradigm meant merely swapping a female for a male did nothing to fundamentally deconstruct patriarchy. Placing a female character in a male subject position certainly does

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little to undermine the values of a society apparently built on who is better at enacting violence. Women can be good at fighting and violence, but ‘so what?’ The warrior woman may turn out to be a transitionary figure – as women in the real world gain more in power, perhaps these fantasy images of magically strong and tough women will diminish in favour of images which more obviously balance masculine and feminine attributes, as seems to be happening with Wynonna Earp. In the meantime, they provide images of a particular kind of strength with which the audience can armour themselves and play out fantasies of might and invulnerability. Fans often respond to the complexities of the love situation for the heroine, as her closest lover often turns out to be the most brutal enemy. These reversals are all too common and demonstrate the realities of patriarchal life for most women, where danger in the form of rape or domestic abuse is more often perpetrated by an intimate partner than a stranger on the street. The ‘love’ stories as rewritten by fans do often contain a striking sado-masochistic element at their core, suggesting a psychological energy that needs bringing to consciousness. The warrior women of television have become more plentiful over the last twenty years, and the heroines have become more successful in their narrative arcs too. Xena might have chosen martyrdom to atone for the crimes of her warlord days, but Buffy succeeds in breaking free of the Council of Watchers and frees all potential Slayers, and Wynonna does find freedom for the Ghost River Triangle, but then must leave it to find her daughter. In fairy tales, the hero who kills the monster returns to rule the kingdom, but where is the reward for these warrior women? Where is their Queendom? They survive, they kill the monsters, they succeed, but then what? Where is their triumphant return to society ready to take up their places of leadership? A question we will return to in Chapter 6.

5

Hybrid evolutions

This chapter explores heroines whose characteristics tend towards the science fiction end of the fantasy spectrum, focusing on The Bionic Woman, Dark Angel and Jessica Jones which takes us in a more speculative direction with their narratives. These heroines are the result of experiment, becoming human hybrids: Jaime Somers (Lindsay Wagner) is a cyborg, a human augmented by machine; Max Guevara (Jessica Alba) is a human augmented by animal DNA; and Jessica Jones (Krysten Ritter) gains enhanced abilities after gene-editing experiments. Hybridity has been a feature of cyborg and artificial intelligence characters in particular, showing up in a range of Cult TV dramas. Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan), a favourite character from Star Trek Voyager (UPN, 1995–2001), was a human female rescued from the alien/technology Borg collective who struggles to rediscover her individuality and humanity. The rebooted Battlestar Galactica presented a range of important female characters who were technology clothed in flesh. Of the eight ‘skinjob’ Cylons (those who looked human from the outside as distinct from the obviously mechanical Centurions and ships), only three were female but all were violent and mystical and unreliably prone to switching sides. HBO’s Westworld (2016–ongoing) also features biomechanoid characters, called hosts, who bleed, eat and make love. The hosts’ consciousness is created and then made and remade over and over again as they die or are killed in the Westworld amusement park. As the story unfolds, and the length of their ‘lives’ and the number of their ‘deaths’ become clearer, the depth and variety of their memories seem to make them all unstable, though it is two female hosts in particular who are driven to act, aware of the unreliability of their memories and even emotions, but Seasons 1 and 2 of Westworld relied on Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) as the driving force of the narrative. Other forms of ‘made’ women also appear in ensemble dramas. In Babylon 5, Lyta Alexander (Patricia Tallman) is an angry telepath, who participates in

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a failed revolution. Lyta becomes increasingly powerful, but in the end there is nowhere for the liberated and powerful Lyta to go and she is exiled from human space. The cost of her power is not a seat at the table, but exile to the margins. Showtime’s Penny Dreadful (2014–16), presented Lily (Billie Piper) as a creation of Dr Frankenstein (Harry Treadaway), brought back to life intended as a bride for Frankenstein’s original creature, but after meeting Dorian Gray (Reeve Carney) she begins plotting a bloody revolution of prostitutes. However, Frankenstein and Gray undertake a counterplot to make her into a ‘proper woman’ once more, and although Lily persuades Victor to let her go, she leaves him and Gray to go who knows where. In this show’s bold rewriting of many nineteenth-century horror classics, Lily is one of the few survivors, but, like Lyta, this leaves her exiled rather than in power. Hybrid heroines are presented as being especially powerful and threatening, but as their narratives unfold they also turn out to be the most unstable. Their fundamental nature is liminal, unable to settle to one thing or another, and they battle to find balance. The hybrids are partial selves struggling to tolerate even their own differences, and this makes them the most diverse, fragmented and unreliable of all the heroines. They represent a feminine on the edge of becoming something else where that ‘something else’ might be heroic or it might be monstrous, and they themselves fear they are freaks, monsters and aberrations, in danger of losing their humanity, even as they long for a sense of integrated being. Their power and their potential to turn to the ‘dark side’ position them on the fringes of dominant ideology. The unstable mix of human and ‘other’ has been most theorized from a feminist point of view in the figure of the cyborg. The incorporation of the cyborg into feminist theory began with Donna Haraway’s influential essay A Cyborg Manifesto in 1985 which was a polemic piece intended to restart a discussion around socialist feminism which the author felt had disappeared in Ronald Reagan’s America. It is suggestive of a number of boundaries which are violated – human and animal, organism and machine, physical and nonphysical. It is fascinating when considering the role of the transcendent function in fantasy that in an interview some years later, Haraway described the essay as ‘a kind of dream-space piece’ (Bell, 2007, p. 96) which was ‘written with a kind of contained ironic fury’ (Bell, 2007, p. 99). It was intended to invite readers into a ludic, liminal space in order to imagine differently a role that fantasy and Cult TV also carry out. For Haraway, the cyborg is a figure at the border between organism and machine, between nature and technology, and her cyborg, just like our hybrid

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heroines, is a ‘creature of social reality as well as a creation of fiction’ (Haraway, 2004, p. 7). The figure of the cyborg ruptures such dualities, transgressing boundaries and creating dangerous possibilities that encourage us to think about the possibility of seeing from both sides of the boundary at the same time, where we are not afraid of ‘permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints’ (Haraway, 2004, p. 13). In this chapter I have taken the liberty of extending the idea of the cyborg to include other kinds of hybrid creation such as that of genetic engineering and experimentation. Jaime Somers, Max Guevara and Jessica Jones are women but they are also the familiar made unfamiliar and an unstable mix of identities. These female characters are powerful figures in a variety of ways and yet are also unstable, thus seem to be held back from reaching their full potential.

The Bionic Woman (NBC, 1976–8) The Bionic Woman in the figure of Jaime Somers was a character originally developed to be the girlfriend of The Six Million Dollar Man (NBC, 1973–8), Steve Austin (Lee Majors). Like Xena, she proved such a popular character that she was brought back for her own show which lasted three seasons and three spin-off TV movies with the last, Bionic Ever After, airing in 1994. The character of Jamie Somers debuted in a two-part storyline in The Six Million Dollar Man, itself based on a novel The Cyborg (1972) by Martin Caidin. The central premise for both shows concerned a governmental agency the OSI (Office of Scientific Intelligence) which had found a way to reconstruct a human body with robot parts. Steve Austin was an astronaut ‘repaired’ after an accident, and Jaime is introduced in Season 2 of The Six Million Dollar Man as Steve’s childhood sweetheart. After they meet again, romance rekindles and marriage is in the air, shown in an extended romantic montage of Jaime and Steve, horse riding, bike riding and eating pizza, all to a song ‘Sweet Jaime’, sung by Lee Majors. However, the physically active couple’s skydiving date goes horribly wrong, and Jaime is left with life-threatening injuries. Steve begs Oscar Goldman (Richard Anderson) the boss of the OSI to save Jaime the way he had saved Steve. Thus Jaime becomes a bionic woman, going on missions for the OSI and helping to keep America safe. The Bionic Woman became one of the most popular shows in television in its debut year 1976 (Inness, 1999, p. 46). It was intended as a mainstream ratings puller for a major network, broadcast in a mid-evening slot, and although its

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‘science fiction/action adventure generic formulation was designed primarily for children, The Bionic Woman was also intended to draw in adult audiences’ (Sharp, 2007, fn 3, p. 510). The show certainly did receive high ratings, and as it ‘was listed as fourth in the top ten favourites of [women 18–34] in the Nielson reports of January-April 1976’ (Sharp, 2007, fn 8, p. 510). So, it is tempting to view the show as a feminist success story; after all, Jaime is a strong, independent career woman, but closer examination of the character’s narrative trajectory reveals that she is at the same time unstable and prone to hysteria. The central cyborg contradiction of human and machine is at the heart of the show, but there are a number of other tensions at play within the text that emphasizes Jaime’s difficult hybrid nature: she is a cyborg and thus inhabits the technology/nature duality, but the show tries to offset this by doubling down on her traditional femininity (Sharp, 2007, p. 517). The way Jaime is presented to the audience is telling. Although not overtly glamorous, Jaime is attractive in conventional feminine ways. Lindsay Wagner was tall and slim. Her hair is softly styled in the 1970s way – long, wavy or often in a ponytails, but it is a dark ashy blonde, mousy even, not a bleach blonde. Her make-up is naturalistic, a little mascara, some clear lip gloss, but not red lipstick. Her clothing tends to be fairly neutral, even sensible, wearing jeans, denim dungarees, sweaters, sweatshirt, shirts and with flat shoes mostly such as sandals and trainers. Certainly her character is a tennis professional so it makes sense that her costume leans towards the athletic side of things. Her more formal attire is softly tailored, with neutral colours and beige prevalent, not unusual for the period, but even when dressing up for an evening occasion as in Welcome Home Jaimie Part Two (1.2) she is not ‘super sexy’ and the choice of dress is relative conservative, with only modestly high heels. There is still no red lipstick. Thus although her bionics make her stronger than a man, her looks are designed to camouflage that strength in the most unthreatening, ‘girl next door’ way possible. Another element of Jaime’s conventional femininity and camouflage is her domestic competence. In fact the very first extended bionic scenes, where Jaimie is not responding to demands from doctors and is free to choose, feature housework! She has been offered a place to live at Steve’s parents’ farm, but it is a barn and she must turn it into an apartment. The montage sequence features her throwing junk out the window, washing the floor in double quick time and then painting at super speed, down on her hands and knees scrubbing the floor and polishing the windows. Later in the same episode she is excited about the delivery of a cooker and uses her bionic arm to lift it off the truck, and later still

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opens a tin of tuna for dinner with her bionic nail. It is good to know that the biggest advantage of bionics for a woman means being able to do the housework faster. Jaime is also presented as being caring and especially kind to children and animals. Besides taking care of Max, the bionic dog who appears at the start of Season 3, she had always insisted on continuing to work as well as undertaking missions for the OSI, and so she becomes a primary school teacher to ‘difficult’ kids on a military airbase, tearing a telephone directory in half in order to gain their respect and receiving an apple from them at the end of the episode. In Angel of Mercy (1.3) set in an unspecified South American country, Jaime takes time to befriend a child soldier who later helps with her escape. In the final episode of Season 3 On the Run (3.22), she is on assignment babysitting the daughter of a top scientist defector. Oscar her boss makes the point, ‘Well, you know how Jaime is. She loves kids. She’s always happiest when she’s around them.’ Children are a regular feature, and in the final episode of the TV series, it is two children who are prominent in her journey of self-discovery. There is a constant conflict for Jaime between her career and her personal life which does not always seem to be consistent, since she is the one who insisted on working for the OSI as well as having a job as teacher. However, by the end of Season 3 this conflict has become acute and is the reason for her desire to leave the OSI, which she says has become too time consuming and negative. As she points out in On the Run (3.22), ‘I didn’t even enlist, I was drafted.’ In her resignation letter to Oscar she says, ‘I’m tired of looking in the mirror and seeing an OSI agent instead of a woman. I’m just tired. Tired.’ It is a theme picked up again in the final bionic outing Bionic Ever After where Jaime, who has become a therapist working with OSI agents, is seeking to put off her wedding to Steve because of work concerns (though it is really because she is concerned she is rejecting her bionics again). Steve is not happy and argues back: ‘So we wait? For what? The day that Jaime Somers stops caring about her patients? The day that her professional career doesn’t step on her private life? That sounds like a very long wait.’ The conflict of the difficulties of paid work versus her pleasure in domestic work seems to have paralleled a real conflict for women of the period. Ability to earn outside of the home had not meant a lessening of domestic responsibilities for most women and is still a contentious issue today. It is also noticeable that Jaime is very often a lone woman. On OSI jobs she regularly has to prove her competence to sexist men but at the same time try to make friends with them, even turn them into allies. She does this through a mixture of attractiveness, charm, not losing her temper, and being especially

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good at whatever it is she is doing: a tiring act for real women to follow. In Deadly Music (3.17), for example, she has to go undercover on a diving expedition, and when she arrives she is treated to an impromptu interview with two of the male divers who ask her a number of technical questions before she is ‘welcomed aboard’. There are no other female characters in this episode at all, a theme all too prevalent in all three seasons of the show. For example, in the double opening episodes of the series, it is not till partway through the second episode that Jaime even gets to speak to another woman, in this case Steve’s mother and all they speak about is Steve. Jaime is constantly surrounded by men – Steve, Oscar, and her doctors Dr Wells (Martin E. Brooks) and Dr Marchetti (Richard Lenz) – who are judging her and making decisions on her behalf, especially in the ‘origin’ episodes in The Six Million Dollar Man. Dr Marchetti is particularly troubling as he is the doctor who brought her back to life, but he also confides to Steve in The Return of the Bionic Woman (The Six Million Dollar Man 3.1) that he finds her ‘incredibly attractive’, adding ‘her mind is quick and her wit is sharp and she’s a lovely woman ….I’m not blind about how terrific it would be to have her around a whole lot’. This is certainly not what we would expect any doctor to say about a patient now. Jaime does not have anyone to confide in, not even a female nurse or a secretary, only the men who have created her. It is part of a recurring pattern where crucial decisions are made for Jaime, especially obvious after Jaime’s accident, where Steve asks a barely conscious Jaime lying in a hospital bed if she will trust him and she makes a noise which might be consent, or it might be a groan of pain, but his own bionics are still secret and so she has no way of knowing what he is really asking her. When she wakes up after surgery, she says: ‘I don’t want to be a freak. Why didn’t you just let me die?’ The three men have made a radical decision on her behalf and seek to persuade her that it was the right one. Later, after a run with Steve she grudgingly agrees: ‘It might be ok being the bride of Frankenstein.’ Indeed, throughout The Bionic Woman there is a constant threat that Jaime and her bionics might be incompatible, an incompatibility that does not appear to be an issue for Steve who is never in danger of rejecting his mechanical parts. In the episode The Bionic Woman Part 2, Dr Wells explains that Jaime’s body is creating large amounts of white blood cells to fight off ‘something foreign’ that is the bionics and she has a clot forming in her brain. ‘Jaime’s body is rejecting her bionics’, he says and a distraught, hysterical Jaime overhears and runs away. Steve has to chase after her into the stormy night, filled with thunder and lightning. He retrieves her, but such is the dramatic level of her bionic rejection that Jaime

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actually dies at the end of this episode. So in the debut double episode in The Six Million Dollar Man, Jaime cannot handle her bionics, becomes filled with pain, goes berserk and eventually dies on the operating table. For all of Jaime’s bionic physical strength, sharp wit and emotional intelligence, underneath ‘lurks a fragile, part human, part mechanical body that is always on the verge of catastrophe’ (Sharp, 2007, p. 521). This ‘verge of catastrophe’ remains a constant theme throughout the rest of the series. Although the popularity of the character ensured that she did not stay dead for long and after having the clot on her brain removed, she survives but does not remember her relationship with Steve. There is a lingering fear from the men surrounding Jaime of her getting too emotional, of a ‘dangerous reaction’ to emotional stimuli and memory, particularly of Steve. The final episode of the television series (3.22) makes it clear that Jaime’s acceptance of her cyborg self was never complete. The child she is babysitting recoils in horror at seeing the wires in her arm and back away in horror asking ‘What are you?’ Later she calls Jaime the ‘Robot Lady’ which prompts Jaime to write a resignation letter to Oscar. Jaime wants to give it all up and see if she can live a ‘normal’ life, but Oscar has to explain that she does not have the choice of quitting and that the OSI regards her bionics as government property. He tells her to go on the run. The scene that follows Oscar’s departure from her barn apartment is an extraordinary expression of self-hatred from the character. She is crying and talking to herself, pulling clothes out of the wardrobe, trying to pack, trying to process what has just happened. She knocks over an alarm clock muttering that Rudy (Marchetti) says she doesn’t need that much sleep because there ‘isn’t that much of me left to get tired’. She pushes the bed and breaks it. Then in a more sinister turn, she begins talking to ‘the machine’ as she walks towards a mirror and the music grows off key: You’re the real problem. You’re the machine I have to take with me wherever I go. You’re always there. And you’re always working. And if I turn on this cute little ear of mine I can hear circuits breaking and I can hear gears spinning. It’s like some time machine. It’s like some awful machine. You used to be so …. and now you’re like some awful machine and I can’t look at you any more.  (On the Run, 3.22)

She smashes the mirror. ‘Why is this happening to me?’ she says to the mirror shards. The camera cuts to the mirror as she says ‘I don’t know.’ After all the assignments and successes, over three seasons, it is a terrible moment of selfloathing and failure (see Figure 13).

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Figure 13  Jaime Somers (Lindsay Wagner) once again struggles to come to terms with her bionics. The Bionic Woman, On the Run (3.22).

Later, in the same episode, her hysteria cranks up another notch, as she ends up at a zoo, looking at a Humpty Dumpty-themed fairground ride. Jaime begins to have some kind of vision, as off-screen children chant the nursery rhyme, a merry go round appears (the camera swirls about and the editing uses dissolves rather than cuts), and she sees herself on top of a high brick wall, then falling, and with dissolves to black and white images of her parachute accident: all rather expressionist for The Bionic Woman. Eventually, surrounded by agents and with nowhere to go, she has a personal epiphany and agrees to come back to the OSI. She explains to Oscar, ‘I have found a way to be at peace with my bionics by accepting the fact that I have no choice. The alternatives are totally unacceptable.’ A strange explanation in which she appears to accept that she has no autonomy in the situation and capitulation is better than attempting to continue to seek independence. She belatedly insists on some conditions, ‘It’s not going to be blow the whistle and Jaime jumps.’ She wants some work that is positive. She wants more time to herself, but essentially she has accepted limited autonomy. In the final outing, the TV film Bionic Ever After, Jaime gets a more conventionally happy ending, of marriage to Steve, but she has to deal with a

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rogue agent sabotaging her bionics and causing her to doubt her sanity and the reliability of her cyborg parts all over again. For once, Steve is also affected, but to a much lesser degree. This last story is an illuminating comparison between ex-astronaut Steve Austin (tough, gruff, manly) who adjusts to life with bionics in the OSI with little difficulty and Jaime who is mentally unstable, rejects the bionics, dies, has two further operations and whom Oscar Goldman (their boss) did not want to deploy in the field in the first place. It illustrates the ways in which masculinity aligns culturally with rationality, technology and science, while ‘technology isn’t feminine, and femininity isn’t rational’ (Balsamo, 2000, p. 151). However, in the end, Jaime survives her cyborg difficulties, succeeds as a field agent, retrains as a therapist and gets her man, even if she remains within the OSI fold. Along the way it is not always or even often brute force that is the key to her success, but rather her empathy and compassion. She takes time to listen to people, to befriend them and make allies of them. Although she is strong and her bionic strength helps, it is deployment of her more ‘feminine attributes’ of kindness and understanding that seem to create her success. This is, of course, the way women are supposed to behave – nice, caring, attractive – so in the final analysis, the fantasy of strength in The Bionic Woman is rather overshadowed by the dominant gender ideology of consensual reality. As we often see with Cult TV shows, in 2008 there was a short-lived (eightepisode) reboot starring Michelle Ryan. It was somewhat grittier, but otherwise largely followed the original. Koistinen (2015) comprehensively examined the similarities and contrasts between the two shows and suggested that if ‘the original bionic woman negotiated the threats and possibilities of second wave feminism, the reimagined Jaime was designed to appeal to (post) modern women who struggle with the conflicting demands and expectations of professional careers and family lives’ (Koistinen, 2015, p. 56), although I would argue that conflicting demand of career and family was also there for the original bionic woman. Some things change, some stay the same. Although The Bionic Woman has faded from collective memory with minimal contemporary fan activity, for young women growing up in the 1970s, Jaime was a charismatic and competent role model, doing a professional job and doing it well. If, like Wonder Woman, she seemed almost supernaturally ‘nice’, charming and always beautiful while fighting the forces of evil, at least she was week after week on the television and at the centre of her own show. The next two hybrid heroines, like Jaime Somers, are ‘made women’ not of their own choosing. These lab-grown women also struggle to find autonomy and

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are blessed/cursed with a nature and capabilities they have no road map for, and as potentially out of control as Jaime. Dark Angel’s Max Guevara (Jessica Alba in what was widely regarded as her breakthrough role) is genetically enhanced with cat DNA which creates side effects such as seizures and going into heat. Jessica Jones has tremendous strength as a result of private company IGH’s experimentation on her following a car accident. Both characters are to a greater or lesser extent traumatized and are seeking to understand the circumstances of their creation. Their abilities are varied and not always clear, because along with their gifts often come side effects which make them emotionally and sometimes even physically unstable.

Dark Angel (Fox, 2000–2) Created by James Cameron and Charles H. Eglee, Dark Angel is set in a nearfuture Seattle where terrorists have deployed an electromagnetic pulse weapon which wipes out most of the United State’s computer systems and digital data, leaving society in chaos. Max Guevara is introduced as a young woman working as a bike courier, who supplements her income with some burglary, but it is made clear from the start that Max is no ordinary woman. Max is a clone enhanced with animal DNA and trained to kill, one of a whole host of ‘transgenic’ experiments created by project Manticore. She escaped the lab that created her ten years previously, and reluctantly becomes involved in a group fostering resistance to the new world order called ‘Eyes Only’ in the person of Logan Cale (Michael Weatherley) in return for his help in tracking down her fellow escapees. Dark Angel has often been situated with Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Xena: Warrior Princess, as examples of dramas with warrior women at their core, and yet I have chosen to discuss Dark Angel in this chapter of hybrids. Max is tough looking, rides a motor bike and tends to tackle trouble head on. Her genetic enhancements and training give her distinct physical advantages, and yet despite this her fighting ability is not at the centre of the story (as it can be argued was the case for both Buffy and Xena). Instead, the driving force of the narrative is the gradual unveiling of Project Manticore and its genetic experimentation, alongside a political resistance to the corrupt post-Pulse world. Max and Jessica share a similar look, featuring feminine hairstyles – glossy long dark hair, gently waved – set against more masculine clothing such as black leather jackets and trousers, perhaps an update of Jaime’s athletic look. Max is

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generally sleek, boyish even, in her clothing choices except that her close fitting outfits reveal her curves in a paradoxically glamorous way. Despite the name, Max would never be mistaken for a man, a fact that Alba herself noted in an interview from 2012. The show ‘premiered when I was 19’, she explained. ‘And right away, everyone formed a strong opinion about me because of the way I was marketed. I was supposed to be sexy, this tough action girl.’ She continued, ‘I felt like I was being objectified, and it made me uncomfortable’ (Lennon, 2012). Writing in 2005, Jowett pointed out that Dark Angel exhibited a more than usual emphasis on the body of its female protagonist, and that although Max rarely wore skirts or dresses, her appearance was obviously coded as feminine through the tight clothing, make-up and hairstyling, and in the pilot episode she goes undercover as a prostitute (Jowett, 2005). Crosby was more forthright stating that Max was ‘the perfect female’ completely fabricated by and for a patriarchal agenda (Crosby in Inness, 2004, p. 156). It is difficult to disentangle Alba from the character of Max, especially when ‘Alba and her physique were at the centre of the popular success of the show, which catapulted her career … into stardom’ (Butkus, 2012, p. 181). In the narrative, Max is created by a lab to be the perfect super-soldier, whilst in the real world Jessica Alba was created by the entertainment industry PR machine to be the perfect cover girl, eventually, after the cancellation of the show itself, appearing on the cover of Playboy as their ‘Sex Star of the Year’ in 2006. Alba’s persona complicated any feminist message the show might have been attempting to deliver, but it is doubly complex because the Playboy cover appeared without Alba’s permission and which she sought legal redress (The Smoking Gun, 2006). Although beautiful and presented as physically strong, the instability of Max’s hybrid nature is front and centre of the double length pilot episode. Within the first few moments of the title sequence, several versions of Max are introduced to the audience. Firstly, she is shown as a child escaping from the Manticore facility, then as a dark figure atop a derelict Seattle Space Needle with a short voiceover bridging the gap between then and now. The next scene however, marking the beginning of the present tense diegesis, depicts a shaking and anxious-looking Max, gulping down pills then sitting on her bathroom floor, suffering from further flashbacks to her childhood at Manticore (see Figure 14). The juxtaposition of the child Max, Max on the Space Needle and the shaking on the bathroom floor, highlights her flawed hybridity within the first five minutes. The combination of seizures and flashbacks is then repeated at twentyfive minutes and at fifty minutes where the accompanying flashbacks reveals that the catalyst for the children’s escape was protecting the young Max who has

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Figure 14  The very first present-day scene with Max (Jessica Alba) shows her gulping down pills and shaking. Dark Angel, Pilot (1.1).

having a seizure and was thus in danger of ‘termination’. Finding the pills that she uses to control the shaking is what confirms to Logan that she is one of the Manticore escapees and thus gives him leverage over her. In 1.4 Flushed, Max’s need for the Tryptophan pills is the ‘A’ story of the week, when her well-meaning friends flush her pills down the toilet, and Max has to break into a hospital to find more. However, in a strange narrative elision, by Season 2, this key flaw had disappeared. Another ‘quirk’ of Max’s animal DNA is established in Heat (1.3) where Max ‘goes into heat’ like a cat three times a year, in the words of her own character she is ‘climbing the walls looking for some action’. She seems conflicted about this desire, and significant voiceover is devoted to an internal debate as to whether or not she might give into it. In fact, she returns to a bar to pick up a young man, but un/fortunately he turns out to be too drunk to perform and he simply falls asleep, though his family connections later turn out to be of some use. Max goes ‘into heat’ again towards the end of the season in Miaow (1.21) where Max drifts in and out of her hypersexualized state accompanied by a comic-scratched record needle noise, as she tries to fight her lust, refusing at first to give into it as some friends suggest, but eventually having sex with a fellow motor bike enthusiast. However, since this is lieu of dinner with Logan, she is not happy about it and cries in the shower, describing herself as ‘poison’ and a ‘freak’ to her friend Cindy (Valarie Rae Miller). In this, Max is not given, and does take,

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autonomy over her sexual self, but like the seizures this trait simply disappears in Season 2. These ‘flaws’ however were a part of the show that captured fans’ imaginations, especially those writing fan fiction, who liked the idea of the otherwise perfect Max having an Achilles heel, especially, of course, one related to sexual desire. Perhaps if the show had continued for more than two seasons, this narrative eccentricity would have been resolved. Like The Bionic Woman, the prevalence of male power is again an issue for Max in Dark Angel. Although Max is allowed one female friend in the form of Original Cindy, like Jaime, she is mostly surrounded by men with the two most prominent being Colonel Lydecker (John Savage), who is Max’s creator, and Logan (Michael Weatherly), a revolutionary called ‘Eyes Only’. Lydecker was Max’s immediate commanding officer at Manticore who oversaw the creation and training of the X5s (the name of Max’s particular clone model). At first he is intent on hunting down all the escaped transgenics, but after being betrayed by his own superior, he switches sides in Season 2 and becomes something of an ally. Logan is the rich boy rebel, who runs ‘Eyes Only’ and who forces Max to work for him by promising to help with her own quest of finding the other Manticore escapees. He is also attracted to her and the two are briefly physically close. Logan’s need for Max however is really to do the physical tasks for ‘Eyes Only’ he can no longer do, as in the Pilot episode, Logan is shot in the spine and becomes wheelchair bound. In Season 2, Alec (Jensen Ackles) a fellow escapee from Manticore, joins the regular cast as a sibling foil for Max, along with Joshua (Kevin Durand), a transgenic with dog DNA. Like all the hybrid characters in this chapter, Max is a figure of paradoxes: she tries to escape the constraints of patriarchy by repeatedly eluding Lydecker and exceeding the capabilities of her predominantly male and authoritarian foes. However at the same time she is propelled back towards this core through her stereotypical romantic and at times almost submissive pairing with Logan – it is perhaps pertinent that Michael Weatherley was some fourteen years older than Alba at the start of the show. In fact, Crosby suggests that Max’s heroic journey really ‘consists of flights from one male authority to another’ (Crosby in Inness, 2004, p. 156) – from Manticore and the military academy with Lydecker as her commander to Logan and eventually the character of ‘Father’, who is the true creator of all the transgenics in Season 2. Crosby suggests that Max always and inevitably chooses the patriarchal community and that ‘choice’ appears so natural and necessary that she often seems to have no agency at all. Crosby is no fan of the show and goes on to argue that the real focus of the show was not Max at all but Logan. Fans wanted more Max and less Logan but James Cameron

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‘chose instead to let the television network cancel Dark Angel rather than push his real hero into the background’ (Crosby in Inness, 2004, p. 161). Butkus (2012), however, is less negative about the show’s feminist credentials and builds on the work of Chion to recuperate a case for Max’s autonomy through observations about its sonic architecture, particularly its use of voiceover. Chion pointed out that in most film (and by extension television) ‘the presence of a human voice structures the sonic space that contains it’ (Chion, 1999, p. 5) because the voice is always at the centre of any sound mix in an audiovisual text. As he put it, ‘There are not all the sounds including the human voice. There are voices and then everything else’ (Chion, 1999, p. 5). In many of the early episodes of Dark Angel voiceover from Max is used as an interior monologue, a relatively rare thing in the broad context of American television, especially from female characters (Butkus, 2012, p. 185). The use of an interior monologue is a powerful message to the audience about the centrality of the character and her place in the drama as well as creating a sense of intimacy with that character. According to Doane the ‘voice displays what is inaccessible to the image, what exceeds the visible: the “inner life” of the character. The voice here is the privileged mark of interiority, turning the body “inside-out”’ (Doane, 1980, p. 41). Thus for Max to be given her own voiceover, expressing her innermost thoughts, her interior monologue to herself (since she is not telling the story to anyone else) gives the voiceover tremendous power. This attention to sound rather than just image provides some intriguing observations about the braids of signification that make up the audiovisual text of Dark Angel, and yet in the face of the dominance of the physicality of Alba, the costuming and the narrative across the two seasons, it does seem pitifully little, especially as Butkus has to note that in Season 2, the opening voiceover is no longer Max’s but an anonymous woman and that this ‘particular slide seems rather to signal a subtle loss of (liberatory) power in the context of the larger sonic architecture’ (Butkus, 2012, p. 198). Perhaps surprisingly for a show with a short two-season run, there is still evidence of regular fan activity around the show, at least in part due to three novels by Max Allan Collins which were all considered canon, along with a video game. There are also wikis (such as Dark Angel Wiki); although not as complete as others in this book, it is still being updated and plenty of fan fiction being created (see Fanfiction.net which has over 5,000 entries tagged with Dark Angel). As noted earlier, the physical quirks of Max’s hybrid nature are certainly one of the elements of the show that fans responded to even if they were subsequently written out, but another was the character of Alec who often

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comes to the rescue of Max when her seizures placed her in danger. Many other stories feature Alec hurt or kidnapped, but there are also plenty of slash fiction, leading one commentator to say that ‘Alec seems to be DA’s little black dress, he goes with everyone’ (Denyce, 2008). It is clear that at least some of Dark Angel’s continued existence in the online forums is to do with the popularity of Jensen Ackles’s subsequent show Supernatural (The CW, 2005–19) which ran for fifteen seasons, and the crossover stories between the two shows are a significant contribution to the material being generated. Max Guevara was a character created on the boundaries of human and animal, who, like Jaime, feared being a freak, but the dominant ideologies at work in the text curtailed the more radical elements, always taming the character into more conventionally feminine forms. Coming over a decade after the cancellation of Dark Angel, Jessica Jones had a chance to offer a different kind of hybrid heroine.

Jessica Jones (Netflix, 2015–19) Like many of the shows in this book, Jessica Jones began life as a comic. Alias written by Brian Michael Bendis and drawn by artist Michael Gaydos was first published in 2001. The story was part of the Marvel Universe but introduced a different kind of superhero. Private detective Jessica Jones (played on TV by Krysten Ritter) was ‘Avengers adjacent’, and a friend of Carol Danvers’s Captain Marvel and Peter Parker’s Spiderman, but Alias was the first comic to be published under Marvel’s new MAX Comics imprint for mature readers, so the tone was much darker and aimed at adults. The more explicit tone of the comic partly explains why the TV series went to Netflix, rather than a major network like ABC, as Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD had in 2013. It is difficult to see how the morose, drunken, ethically dubious and sexually active Jones could have been adapted for a mainstream network without so many changes as to render her a different character altogether. As Melissa Rosenberg the showrunner pointed out, Alias was ‘the first comic book Marvel had ever put out that was an adult R-rated book, so I started with that. When I was creating the series, I just started with that tone, and that edge, and it just kept going’ (Patten, 2015). The show debuted on Netflix in 2015, as the second of a four series deal which culminated in the team up show The Defenders in 2017. Jessica Jones returned for standalone seasons in 2018 and 2019, whilst Luke Cage and Iron Fist were cancelled after a second season each. Jessica Jones was also the first female superhero of the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe) to have her

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own show. (Agent Carter (2015–16, ABC) did debut earlier in 2015, but Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell) was not a super hero, but rather a human working for SHIELD.) Jessica is a private detective with a troubled past: her family was killed in a car crash when she was a teenager, which, flashbacks indicate, Jessica still feels responsible for. The gravely injured Jessica becomes the subject of corporate experimentation which saves her life and results in not only greater healing powers but enhanced strength. However Jessica’s troubles are far from over. The show picks up Jessica’s story as she is recovering from her time with a mind control villain called Kilgrave (David Tennant), also a victim of experimentation who developed the power to control all those around him. He is a deluded monster with all the emotional intelligence of a spoiled ten year old. Jessica managed to escape his control when he was hit by a bus and apparently killed, but the narrative of Season 1 revolves around the discovery that Kilgrave is not dead. The style of the show mirrors this emotional darkness with repeated references to the Film Noir genre of the 1940s and 1950s, beginning with the title sequence, featuring visuals designed by David Mack, the cover artist of the original comic book series. The music is composed by Sean Callery, for which he won an Emmy in 2016. The opening music begins with a gentle jazz theme played on piano and acoustic double bass before morphing into a more contemporary rock sound with screaming electric guitar. As well as the music, the show also adopts another Film Noir stylistic element – the voiceover – which, as discussed earlier, works to give a subjective point of view on the narrative and usually power to the narrator. Film Noir voiceovers were different however, often containing ‘weak, powerless narrators who tell a story of their past failures or of their inability to shape the events of their lives to their own designs’ (Hollinger, 1999, p. 243). So while Jessica is not, by virtue of her great strength, powerless per se, she does struggle to come to terms with her own past failures as she sees it. Whilst Noir films often used the device of telling a story to someone else, sometimes in confessional mode, in Jessica Jones as in Dark Angel, it is an interior monologue, not heard by any character within the narrative, but which offers the audience ‘telling access to a person’s inner world, especially to that level of the self where desire and repression interact and seek formulation’ (Telotte, 1989, p. 15). The audience often hear Jessica’s bleak thoughts and ways of blaming herself that does not directly spill out into the visuals, except in Season 2 when a distraught Jessica begins hallucinating an inner Kilgrave taunting her for killing the prison guard who was torturing her mother.

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Meanwhile, the mise en scène is also Noir-ish, featuring gritty streets, graffitied walls, dive bars and late night minimarts. Jones’s apartment, in a brown stone building, is located in Hell’s Kitchen, an area of New York itself associated with the Noir genre, historically being home to speakeasies, bordellos, gangs and gangsters, and some of the exteriors are filmed on location in New York. Jessica’s apartment, with its often broken front door and bathroom complete with cockroaches, is intended to be horrible, but the bed sheets look like goodquality linen and there are some modish lamps in the background offering a rather stylized form of ‘gritty’, but the apartment is also frequently the scene of hand-to-hand fighting, where walls and windows are broken, so that by the start of Season 2 it has the air of a building site. Jones herself is a version of the classic hard-bitten, cynical private eye made famous by Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon (John Houston, 1941) or The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946), making Jones a kind of Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe with lipstick. Like her cinema predecessors, Jessica has the air of one who sees it all, has low expectations of humanity, no social graces, but is wily, cunning and determined to do whatever it takes to get the job done, for example, in AKA It’s Called Whisky (1.3) Jessica ruthlessly uses her junkie friend Malcolm (Eka Darville) as a distraction when she wants to steal the drugs capable of knocking out Kilgrave from a hospital. As already noted, Jessica’s costume is fairly gender neutral – jeans, vest tops, leather jacket. However, like so many heroines, her sleep deprived; hard drinking (wild Turkey bourbon of the cheapest sort) ways do not seem to make any mark on her looks. She is a functioning alcoholic, and yet her skin is smooth, her hair is glossy and bouncy, her lipstick and eyeliner in good order, even when she has been drunkenly unconscious or engaged in a night of sex, which, unlike Max, Jessica has little compunction in enjoying when the opportunity arises. Whilst we do see Jessica in the bathroom showering or with wet hair, the audience do not see her applying the trademark lipstick. So the rules or myths about effortless grooming and ‘indestructible beauty’ are maintained, despite the darker tone. The narrative of Season 1 revolves around questions of autonomy, leaving Jessica’s ‘origins’ story to Season 2. Through his powers of mind control, Kilgrave was able to dominate Jessica and completely remove her autonomy. She was utterly in his control. He chose what she would wear, eat, when she could sleep, when she would have sex with him and even told her when to smile, and in examining Jessica’s situation when faced with the possibility of returning to that state of being, the series uses it ‘to examine several important themes, including abuse (physical, sexual and emotional) trauma, PTSD, rape culture, issues of

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consent, alcoholism, drug addiction, the plight of victims, and the importance of family’ (Rayborn & Keyes, 2018, p. 6). However, it is autonomy that is particularly pertinent to Season 1 and which contained a clear gendered element. It is most clearly articulated in AKA WWJD (1.8) where Jessica and Kilgrave have an exchange which could be seen as a discussion about gender politics in a #MeToo or post-Weinstein era and as an example of male privilege writ large, but it also encapsulates some of the issues around autonomy and choice and is worth quoting in full. Jessica, who has been trying to inculcate in Kilgrave some kind of empathy, is horrified to discover Kilgrave does not appear to understand that what he did to her (and others) was coercive compulsion and rape. Kilgrave: Jessica:

Kilgrave: Jessica: Kilgrave: Jessica: Kilgrave:

 hich part of staying in five star hotels, eating in all the best W places and doing whatever the hell you wanted is rape? The part where I didn’t want to do any of it. Not only did you physically rape me, but you violated every cell in my body and every thought in my goddamn head. It’s not what I was trying to do. It doesn’t matter what you were trying to do. You raped me again and again and again. No. No. How am I supposed to know? Huh? I never know if someone is doing what they want or what I tell them to. Oh poor you. You have no idea, do you? Having to painstakingly choose every word I say.

How quickly he turns the conversation back to himself. Of course, Kilgrave is a male character who has power over everyone around him but is also a narcissist capable only of seeing things from his own perspective. He does not understand what he does to his victims, only that he gets what he wants, and he sticks to his story that Jessica was on board for what happened between them, even when she has him imprisoned. It is concerning that as women become freer in contemporary society and central female characters in drama are growing more common, at the very same time fantasies of male domination become ever more extreme. Jessica is enhanced with superhuman strength; yet, she has no defence against the word of Kilgrave. At least, that is how the story begins. By AKA Sin Bin (1.9), Jessica starts to realize that in fact Kilgrave cannot control her any longer, and a route to his demise starts to become clear. At first Jessica had all obvious forms of autonomy taken away from her by Kilgrave – self-determination, self-governance and self-authorization, but escaping his direct control still left her with questions, because her autonomy had

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already been impaired and restricted by her personal history, which undermined her ability to see herself as someone responsible for herself and answerable to others. For example, Jessica’s desire to alienate herself from all of those around her and never to trust others is a form of self-sabotage and is a misunderstanding of her true situation. In AKA You’re a Winner (1.6) Luke Cage (Mike Colter) tells her she does not have to face Kilgrave alone, she says she does. But in saying this, she ignores that she already has several allies in her camp, as well as Cage, her foster sister Trish Walker (Rachael Taylor), Will Simpson a cop (Will Traval), a whole group of other Kilgrave survivors, Hogarth the lawyer (Carrie Anne Moss) and Malcolm her neighbour all helping her in one way or another. She manages to alienate Cage by the end of the episode, however, by explaining her role in his wife’s death. Jessica is a character with more physical strength than any other heroine in this book and yet she is the most damaged psychologically and actively repels the goodwill of those around her. In Season 2, which debuted on International Women’s Day and where all thirteen episodes were directed by women (an experiment not repeated in Season 3), the narrative shifts to Jessica’s own origins, though the push for answers comes from Trish rather than Jessica herself. It is not until, in true Noir style, the bodies start to stack up behind Trish’s investigation that Jessica takes an interest. The trail leads to the discovery that Jessica’s mother (Janet McTeer) also survived the accident, through the efforts of the same Dr Karl Malus (Calum Keith Rennie) who worked on Jessica for IGH. Alisa’s recovery however left her with a blazing uncontrollable temper alongside her tremendous strength and healing power. However, in AKA Pork Chop (2.10), whilst trying to find out more about a prison guard who is abusing her mother, Jessica breaks into his apartment and discovers he was responsible for the deaths of previous inmates. Unfortunately for Jessica, he abruptly returns home and pepper sprays her in the face. Blinded and being beaten by an expert with his prison guard baton, Jessica is losing the fight but manages to grab the baton and strikes out with her full strength, catching the guard on the side of his head and killing him. She is horrified by what she has done, and in the following episode AKA Three Lives and Counting (2.11), as a guilt-ridden Jones tries to figure out what to do, her interior monologue becomes jumbled, full of overlapping phrases and words in a variety of voices from mumbles and whispers to an almost shout, accompanied by jump cut editing, signifying her distraught state of mind (and reminiscent of Jaime’s breakdown at the end of The Bionic Woman), but a purple glow suddenly appears on the side of her face, along with a Kilgrave’s voice pointing out that she has killed again. The voice is close miked and without

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any reverb, which creates a feeling of intimacy because the audience sense no distance between the voice and our ear, and the lack of reverb makes the voice appear internal because it does not come from a concrete recognizable space (Chion, 1999, p. 51). Jessica’s internal monologue is colonized by her internal Kilgrave, who proves a catalyst for action and Jessica begins to cover up the crime. As the episode progresses, the hallucinations become ever-more vivid, getting between Jessica and the real world with Kilgrave’s voice and appearance multiplied by a spinning camera (see Figure 15). It is his taunting about how Trish will be a better (and better-looking) superhero than Jessica, followed by Kilgrave’s old injunction to smile that causes her to snap and attack someone in the street thinking it is Kilgrave. However, by the end of the episode, Jessica has found her own voice once more, able to say, ‘I’m not you. And I’m not my mother. I can control myself. Which means I’m more powerful than you ever were.’ To which he replies, ‘I’ll be around if you need me’, and the camera cuts to a fresh angle showing he is gone. Having overcome the external Kilgrave, Jessica must also overcome her inner Kilgrave, just as to achieve autonomy Buffy had to overcome the self-hater symbolized by her relationship with Spike. Jessica encounters her inner Kilgrave only once more in Season 3’s finale. For all that Jessica is the titular protagonist, in Season 2 it is Trish’s quest to become extraordinary by undergoing the process that made Jessica that is the

Figure 15  Jessica (Krysten Ritter) tries to ignore her inner Kilgrave (David Tennant). Jessica Jones, AKA Three Lives and Counting (2.11).

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central narrative force. It is Trish who instigates the investigation into IGH that uncovers Dr Malus and Jessica’s mother, and it is Trish that Alisa is obsessed with because of it. In the end it is Trish who makes the decision to kill Jessica’s mother, who is just too uncontrollable and too prone to hysterical rages to be allowed to continue. Jessica seems paralysed to act and even agrees to go on the run with Alisa. It is even Trish who makes the actual kill shot, and the season finishes with some suggestion that Trish has not been left as unchanged by Dr Malus’s procedure as it first appeared. Trish demonstrates more autonomy within the narrative than the super-powered Jessica, even though Trish’s past is equally traumatic with a controlling mother, addiction and rape, but she seeks out power of her own to combat it. Season 3 continues to follow Trish’s transformation as she determines to become, with her enhanced powers, the hero that she thinks Jessica should be, but the trail of murder and violence she leaves behind, culminating in an attempt on Jessica’s own life, leaves her with the realization that far from being a hero, she is now ‘the bad guy’ (3.13). Trish, also a hybrid, proved the more unstable of the two and her attempts at heroism lead her only towards imprisonment. In some ways Jessica’s success shows up most clearly against her foster sister’s failure. It was a clever device to make Jessica the passenger of much of the narrative rather than its impetus, as this is what she believes about herself and her life, but it also suggests that to seek out power as Trish does is a dangerous choice. The final shots of Season 3 in AKA Everything (3.13), however, does open up the possibility of change for Jessica. Having given the keys to Alias Investigations to Malcolm and said her farewells to Trish, Jessica is standing at the busy ticket desk in the railway station, asking for a ticket to take her towards Mexico. The ticket clerk obliges, but as he pushes the ticket towards her, a familiar purple glow surrounds a close-up of Jessica’s face as the camera slowly tracks towards her. Kilgrave’s voice congratulates her, ‘You’re right to give in. Give up. It’s someone else’s job now’, and the lighting grows darker and the purple glow stronger, but with a look of disgust, Jessica turns away as the camera begins tracking backwards once more. She is standing at the hub of a busy station, passengers moving to and fro, and arrivals and departures board at her back. Possibilities for travel in any direction are clear. As the non-diegetic music track ‘Keep on Living’ by Le Tigre grows in volume, her chin rises with a slight smile and she begins walking, but for the first time, with a sense of ‘towards something’ rather than ‘away from everything’. Jessica’s transformation as protagonist is framed in terms of ‘heroism’ and she is publically recognized in a newspaper’s headline as a ‘Bona Fide Hero’ but Jessica herself still does not feel it, but what she has

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achieved at last is a measure of autonomy. Jessica is no longer at the mercy of her past trauma or of being pushed and pulled by others’ desires or events beyond her control. Her newly acquired sense of self-determination will make her future path truly her own. The first season of the show was warmly greeted ‘as an envelope-pushing, women-centric drama’ (Li, 2018); yet, fan activity around the show was rather muted, perhaps because of its place within the larger MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe). The usual shipper scenarios are explored (Jessica/Malcolm, Jessica/ Trish, Jessica/Kilgrave) as well as a significant number of stories featuring an injured Jessica, or ones around alcohol abuse. However, there was not much of a renewed buzz around the second or third series with many of the entries on Wikipedia, or the MCU wiki itself incomplete or stub articles, and a consumer insight company measuring social media responses to Seasons 1 and 2 noted that posts had fallen by 50 per cent (Clark, 2018). The final season was released in 2019 to lukewarm reviews and complaints about narrative ‘bloating’. The lasting legacy of Jessica Jones may be for its behind-the-scenes female showrunner and all female directors of Season 2 rather than its impact upon female heroines or on fans, and yet, Jessica achieves her autonomy in a way few heroines are allowed to do, certainly Jaime remained with the OSI, and Max was still embroiled with Logan’s plans. Only Jessica, along with Buffy, is free to choose what happens next. The hybrid women in this chapter are among the most ‘fantastical’ and the furthest from the consensual reality. Their ambiguity marks them out and their struggle to resolve that ambiguity, or sometimes just to live with it, is one that audiences responded to. The role of the transcendent function in mediating and allowing dialogue between opposites is most clearly highlighted in dramas with hybridity at their centre, even if the narratives cannot accept that unresolved ambiguity for long. Often the hybrid heroine is rehabilitated with a conventional ‘happy ending’ – Jaime Somers is married but sometimes too the ending is more open – Max is poised to be part of a revolution and Jessica Jones will decide her own future. There is, visible at the edges of these stories, a possibility of profound change, not just of the characters themselves but of the world which they inhabit – revolution, political readjustment, community formation – that the narratives evoke but cannot quite bring themselves to articulate in a concrete fashion, perhaps because it would require the heroines to become leaders and commanders, and that is something that their internal contradictions make highly problematic. The question of leadership is taken up in the next chapter.

6

A question of command

As the number of warrior women in Cult TV has grown, there has also been a growth in the number of women in command positions, at least in ensemble casts, and especially those in sf themed drama: Ambassador Delenn in Babylon 5; Dr Elizabeth Weir (Torri Higginson) who is in command of the mission to the Pegasus galaxy in Stargate Atlantis (2004–9, Sci Fi Channel); President Laura Roslin (Mary McDonnell), the civilian leader of humanity in the rebooted Battlestar Galactica; and more recently, Secretary General of the United Nations Chrisjen Avasarala (Shohreh Aghdashloo) in The Expanse (Syfy/Amazon, 2015–2021). Game of Thrones (2011–19, HBO) also had a good share of female leaders, and indeed by Season 8, apart from Jon Snow (Kit Harrington) there were only women left in the running for the Iron Throne, even if ultimately none of them won it. However, of all the Cult TV heroines in this book, the rarest is the central protagonist who is female and also in command, a rather disappointing state of affairs as we move into the third decade of the twenty-first century. In the ensemble dramas, in particular, female leaders seemed to suffer from ‘narrative fading’ where they begin strongly but then gradually fade in importance as the show progresses, leaving the male characters more firmly in charge. In Babylon 5, Delenn is the ambassador for the Minbari aboard the Babylon station which is a meeting place for alien and human races (a kind of intergalactic United Nations), and as such she wields considerable political influence, but over time she becomes little more than a romantic interest for John Sheridan, the true hero of the show. As their relationship grows, her political power correspondingly seems to diminish and she only exercises leadership when he is absent from the station, leaving her a far more traditional role of helpmeet queen to the king who rules, than a ruler herself. Stargate Atlantis managed to avoid the question of romantic interest between Elizabeth Weir and John Sheppard (Joe Flanagan), but the executive producer

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Brad Wright made it clear who the real star of the show was. Although remaining complimentary about Higginson as an actress, in the Atlantis Special Features on the DVD of Season 1, Brad Wright said: ‘In Joe Flanagan we found that magic quality that I think you have to have in the person who is the centre of your show.’ Weir’s position as leader of the expedition was a doubly unusual one in the Stargate universe because she was a civilian not a military leader. In 1.3 ThirtyEight Minutes she explains to one of the scientists that Atlantis is like a colony and she is the governor, which seems to mean that she stays home fretting like a worried mother or wife, whilst Sheppard, who becomes the ranking military officer on the Atlantis expedition, goes off on exciting missions. However by Season 3 Weir’s leadership is under some pressure. Firstly, as we saw with FBI Agent Scully in Chapter 2, Weir is frequently ‘hauled over the coals’ by the top brass, in this case the International Oversight Advisory (IOA) and forced to justify herself and her decisions. In Misbegotten (3.2) the IOA send a member of the committee Woolsey (played by Robert Picard) to oversee her in action. He does eventually endorse her leadership, but in an odd way. He decides to give her credit for a decision to fire upon a camp where alien Wraiths (the bad guys in this story) are mixed in with their human prisoners. This does, in the bigger picture, save the day, but the decision to do so was in fact taken by Sheppard, not Weir. By First Strike (3.20), Weir comments to another character that the IOA is still hounding her. ‘They put next to no weight behind my opinions regarding the safety and protection of this city’, she says. ‘Yes, the IOA is happy to have me as lead administrator, but when it comes to the big decisions ….? If we get out of this I think I may have to step down.’ There were prophetic words indeed, because by the start of Season 4, Weir is killed in an explosion and replaced as commander of the expedition by Samantha Carter (Amanda Tapping), another favourite character from the original Stargate SG-1 series. Carter, however, is not treated any better than Weir and is recalled to Earth for a review of her first year in command and then unceremoniously relieved of duty by Woolsey at the start of Season 5. The ‘fading away’ of a female character in command was also apparent in the rebooted Battlestar Galactica, which tells the story of an attack on human colonies by the Cylons, a race of sentient robots, originally created by humans, some of whom have evolved to become humanoid cyborgs. The original series was created by Glen A Larson and broadcast in 1978 by ABC. Although it only lasted one season, it remained live in the minds of fans, and in 2003 a new miniseries was created for the Sci-Fi Channel. In the reboot, Laura Roslin becomes the president of Colonies, while Captain Adama (Edward James Olmos) is in charge

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of what is left of the military fleet. Like Delenn, Roslin is an important character in the series but Adama is an established military leader at the beginning of the drama, whereas Roslin only comes to power through a very long chain of command. Roslin and Adama’s leadership is a civilian/military pairing also familiar from Stargate Atlantis, but their roles are gendered beyond just civilian and military. In fact, ‘McDonnell plays the matriarch to Olmos’s patriarch’ (Lavery & Maull, 2010, p. 45) but there seems to be an anxiety around Roslin’s position as civilian leader that does not surround Adama’s military leadership. Roslin, abruptly promoted to the top job of president, expends as much energy on establishing her right to power and hanging onto it as she does in exercising her rule. At the end of the first mini-series, she is presented as president by Adama to the remaining fleet, but that endorsement is what allows her to take up the role, and it is not always forthcoming. She comes under attack at various times, by Adama (who puts her in the brig in Kobol’s Last Gleaming Part 2 (1.13) or Zeric (Richard Hatch), a prisoner-turned politician who sometimes helps her (Home Part 1 (2.6)) and sometimes does not, as in Oath (4.15) where he is involved in a rebellion plot. In the entire series, Roslin never manages to be elected to office. She does become president for a second time, but it is because she inherits the role from the elected Vice President (Zeric) who steps back in her favour (see Collaborators (3.5)). Roslin does not appear to be able to win an election on her own and her hold on power is always fragile. Roslin also has a limited shelf life as a leader for another reason. She is introduced to the audience being given the news that she has a terminal disease, and through the episode, she is often shown as being physically weak, at one stage appearing wrapped in a shawl, but on realizing she is the president, she puts it aside and resumes her more formal jacket. Her cancer comes and goes throughout the series, with Roslin often in hospital, but by the end of the narrative, she is no longer in a formal leadership position. She dies and is buried on the new Earth being colonized by the survivors, both human and cyborg. Roslin is established as fatally ill and with questionable authority, and her command, much like Weir’s in Stargate Atlantis is questioned or ratified by a number of men, before fading away. In 2015, The Expanse presented audiences with a powerful female leader in the wildly glamorous figure of Chrisjen Avasarala. Based on a series of books by James S. A. Corey, The Expanse is set in a universe where Earth, Mars and the Belters (inhabitants of an asteroid belt who are born in space) are on the verge of war. James S. A. Corey was a pen name for authors Daniel Abraham and Ty

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Franck who also wrote and produced for the TV show. It is an ensemble show, with various political factions fighting for power and dominance. James Holden (Steven Strait), a heroic space ship captain, is certainly given a leading role, but so is Chrisjen Avasarala, a lifetime politician from Earth. Avasarala, played by Iranian actress, Shohreh Aghdashloo (who at sixty-three when the show first aired is one of the oldest actresses in a command role), begins as deputy undersecretary to the Executive Administration of the United Nations on Earth and plays an important role in the developing plot, rising to become secretary general. In the books, Avasarala is in her seventies. Avasarala is the epitome of sophisticated elegance, with her costumes, designed by Joanne Hansen, a key aspect of her powerful presence, perhaps to offset the age of the character. They are heavily influenced by Indian fashion, featuring brightly coloured iridescent and embroidered fabrics, statement jewellery and colourful make-up. Under-Secretary Avasarala is no corporate drone. She wears her elaborate outfits with élan, wielding her glamour as a kind of power that manipulates and dazzles her opponents, but she is also a devious politician who does not jump to easy conclusions, all the while swearing like a trooper. The combination of extreme glamour and swearing has made her a popular character with the fans. In a welcome change, Avasarala has resisted fading from the narrative as Delenn, Weir and Roslin did. Although, largely absent from the second half of Season 3, when the human fleet was trapped around the alien Ring and the fate of the human race hung in the balance, once Season 4 resumed (after a move to Amazon), Avasarala’s election struggles were a strong part of the narrative. Although she lost that election, by the end of Season 5 she was back as Secretary General and played a vital role in directing Season 6’s political and military machinations. In a more classical fantasy mode, Game of Thrones also revolved around questions of power, played out through a range of characters, such as the murderous Cersei Lannister (Lena Headley) who is psychologically damaged by her dynastic upbringing but seemingly motivated by the maternal urge to protect her family. She is however ruthless and by the later seasons all her children are dead, leaving her with only a desire to hold onto power to exact her revenge. Daenerys (Emilia Clarke) starts as a young and pretty heiress destined only for dynastic marriage, but events force her to find her own ruthless side. She is often surrounded by male advisors with the exception of Missandei (Nathalie Emmanuel), and she is often reminded by others about her father ‘the mad king’ who planned to burn the inhabitants of King’s Landing. In fact, Cersei and Daenerys both evolve into gruesome, violent leaders, who perpetuate acts

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of great brutality and terrorism. Cersei blows up most of the remaining nobility of King’s Landing in The Winds of Winter (6.10), whilst Daenerys turns her remaining dragon’s fire upon everyone left in the city, civilian and soldier alike in The Bells (8.5). The final episode leads to a council of the remaining Houses placing Bran Stark (Isaac Hempstead Wright) in charge of the six kingdoms. However, Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner) having survived the Lannister court and a brutal marriage to Ramsay Bolton, rose to become the Lady of Winterfell by the end of Season 7 as she finally begins to exert some of her own authority. Having refused to accept Bran as a new high king, the series ends with Sansa being crowned Queen of the Free North, though only because Jon Snow took himself out of the running. The narrative is a complicated political picture, but Bran who has shown no leadership ability at any point is chosen over Sansa who has raised an army to defeat the Night King. In all these ensemble dramas, women in positions of command face difficulties. Some come to power through unusual means, relying upon male characters to endorse their power, whilst others are unable to hold onto to it and fade from sight. Despite the imaginative and speculative nature of Cult TV, the most common place for a woman in command is as a supporting character to a central male figure’s journey, perhaps as a result of the still male-dominated nature of the writer’s room. The image of the strong female leader who is not dependent upon a male for her power is still something which exists only in potentia, but it may be that some of the anxiety about women in leadership positions lies in the fact that to have power and authority requires the women to be old(er), thus tapping into a wider concern about the visibility of older/old women in Western society more generally. As we saw in Chapter 2, if older women are present at all, they often seem to be unreliable and an older woman with power is an anomaly that, at least for now, cannot be accounted for. In 1981 Pratt pointed out that a fully matured personality, which can authentically integrate masculine and feminine roles and take up rulership with secure personal power, is a rare thing for a female hero and makes her a cultural deviant, describing ‘a world so alien to the patriarchy as to be invisible, or … unhearable’ (p. 177), or as Crosby put it the ‘difficulty’ is that a mature successful heroine would ‘claim the hero’s ultimate goal: political authority’ (Crosby, 2004, p. 174). The remainder of this chapter will explore leadership, with particular focus on the contradictions in the role for women, before focusing on two iterations of the Star Trek franchise, which have placed women in command positions and at the centre of the drama.

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In English, the etymology of the word ‘power’ lies in the Latin verb posse meaning ‘to be able’. Thus, implied in the word ‘power’ is some element of agency. To have power is to have the ability to act, and a leader is one who has the power to act. In choosing to include the word ‘command’ in the title of this chapter I wanted to flag up an often-ignored issue in the leadership debate: the question of power, which is, of course, particularly fraught when explored in relation to women within patriarchal society. As Firth and Carroll pointed out, ‘For us the real question is not whether leadership implies power but why it does not appear to acknowledge power’ before going on to admit that the concept of power itself is a ‘vast, entangled and theoretically conflicted terrain’ (in Storey et al., 2017, p. 125). There is a very live debate around leadership in academia: a loud, messy and anxious debate. What is a leader? How can leaders be made? Can you make leaders? What is good leader? Can women be leaders? What do leaders do? One of several recent wide-ranging surveys of the literature called such questions ‘emotionally charged and intellectually challenging’ (Storey et al., 2017, p. xvi). There is something about leadership and power that is not logical and rational but rather emotional and unconscious, which perhaps accounts for the anxiety and difficulties in pinning it down. In general, although leadership has been defined in all sorts of ways, a common assumption is that ‘leadership is an influence process that assists groups of individuals toward goal attainment …. leadership is defined as a process whereby an individual influences a group of individuals to achieve a common goal’ (Northouse, 2019, p. 15). This is a helpful utilitarian definition but the problem is that any attempt to look closer at how or why this happens reveals a much more complex picture. There are so many meanings and emotions packed into that one word – leadership – that one article suggested that leadership is ‘what is known in linguistics as a floating signifier, a signifier that in and of itself means very little, or nothing at all, but acts as a form of discursive relay that holds together all kinds of other chains of association’ (Grint, Jones & Holt in Storey et al., 2017, p. 14). This definition leaves open the possibility that ‘leader’ in fact can mean whatever one wants or needs it to mean in any given situation. In trying to understand how an individual comes to have influence over a group of individuals, traditional approaches to leadership have tended to focus on personality traits, assuming that certain people have special inborn qualities or characteristics that made them leaders. In the 1940s, Chester Barnard, for instance, was clear that leadership was something that could be identified (or achieved) through certain character traits or ‘active personal qualities’ as he called them such as vitality and endurance (i.e. energy, alertness, spring, vigilance),

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decisiveness, persuasiveness, responsibility, intellectual capacity (which he intentionally left to last place) (Barnard, 1997, p. 98). This view focuses on the idea of the exceptional individual but ignores the necessary collective or social production of power that makes leadership possible in the first place. After all, what is a leader without followers? Other approaches have examined the concept of transactional leadership where leaders offer their followers something or transformational leadership where leaders offer their followers a clear purpose and a goal. Some have considered how leadership comes about, examining assigned leadership roles which are based on a formal position within an organization, implying a kind of taken-for-granted vertical hierarchy (though how this itself comes to exist remains an open question) versus ‘emergent leadership’ which may arise in particular situations and may be contingent and/or temporary and implies a more horizontal distribution of power. More recently, the debate has moved away from focusing on a leader per se, toward thinking about what followers are doing, as a way of understanding emergent leadership in particular. As Sinclair pointed out, leadership ‘is always the product of some collusion, whereby a band of supporters agrees that an individual, their leader, has what they need to lead them at a particular time. … leadership and authority are constructed by audiences, by subordinates and superiors, by followers and peers’ (Sinclair, 2005, p. 16). This is an idea that we will come back to later. Although questions about gender and leadership were largely ignored in academic circles until the 1970s, there have been many studies since trying to understand why women are not better represented in elite leadership positions. Simon & Hoyt (in Northouse, 2019) sum up the three ways in which this is usually explained. Firstly, there is the ‘pipeline problem’; in other words, women have less education, training and work experience and more career interruptions than men which leads to too few suitably qualified women. They then go on to discuss in some detail the effect gender differences between women and men (that is socially produced differences, rather than biologically determined ones) might have on leadership, examining, for example, the proposition that women may just lead in differently to men, that is in a more interpersonal, democratic and participative style. Simon & Hoyt are suspicious of this, however, pointing out that this may be adaptive behaviour because women who try to lead in a more traditionally masculine way are evaluated negatively by their followers. Finally, they consider the role of prejudice and discrimination in keeping women out of leadership roles, concluding that men are ‘stereotyped with agentic characteristics such as confidence, assertiveness, independence, rationality and

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decisiveness, whereas women are stereotyped with communal characteristics such as concern for others, sensitivity, warmth, helpfulness and nurturance’ (Simon & Hoyt in Northouse, 2019, p. 410) – suggesting that leaders seem to be what women are not. As we can see however, the debate seems to get rather stuck with a traitbased discussion, because the subtext of much of the literature seems to reiterate that leaders need to be tough, displaying physical stamina and endurance, but also emotionally tough, not showing weakness or flinching from what needs to be done; self-reliant, not dependent or vulnerable; and assertive or even dominating, able to get their point of view heard and accepted, whilst studies have indicated that corporate rituals are designed to foster this. Such rituals might include working long hours/weekends; rarely taking sick leave or even annual leave; sacrifice of family or personal time, and capacity to travel at short notice and be available for the job which must come first (see Sinclair, 2005, p. 38). To fail to conform to these ‘norms’ suggests that one may not be ‘tough enough’ for the job, that one might not be ‘up to it’. It is however is apparent that these qualities apparently required for successful leadership are deeply connected to traditional ideas about masculinity. Toughness, endurance and self-reliance are of course not objectively masculine qualities (if such a thing can be said to exist), but they are socially coded as such and thus a woman performing such qualities becomes an anomaly. Delenn’s feminization through romance means her power must fade, Roslin’s illness demonstrates she is not tough enough and Avasarala’s extreme performance of feminine glamour could be seen as an anxious over-compensation (by the allmale showrunners) for her position of real power within the narrative. There is a complex chain of association around the issue of leadership that makes it difficult territory for women to own because leadership itself is an ouroboros. Even if we strip out all the traits of toughness, endurance and selfreliance, and focus on the idea of power, to have power and to be a leader requires agency and the capacity to exercise power, but to be a person with agency requires external (social) validation of that capacity to act. So although agency is in theory a universal capacity, in reality it is socially gendered. Both agency and power have long been coded as masculine, with men socially validated for displaying them, while women are at best ignored or at worst punished for displaying them. ‘Bossy girls’ are urged to be kinder, quieter, ‘nicer’. No wonder there aren’t more women leaders. The relationship between social conditions and power becomes particularly acute when further considering the issue from a Foucauldian perspective, where

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power is not a resource or a mandate to be shared out or given, but where power creates subjectivity itself. In other words, ‘power does not merely alter what people do, it forges what they actually are’ (Firth and Carroll in Storey et al., 2017, p. 133). For example, beauty regimes have been analysed as acts of disciplinary power designed to produce femininity in female subjects. Beauty habits are part of a ‘large and systematic disciplinary regime – an oppressive and inequitable system of sexual subordination’ (Oksala, 2016, p. 477) which turns women into docile and compliant companions of men just as surely as the army aims to turn its raw recruits into soldiers, where ‘pain, constriction, tedium, semistarvation, and constant self-surveillance are preferable to desexualisation and the loss of a socially recognised identity’ (Oksala, 2016, p. 478). Patriarchal power, acting in a myriad of small social interactions, creates gendered subjectivity or selfhood, constituting male subjects in a privileged position with agency, and constituting female subjects who struggle to claim agency because they are socially validated for passivity rather than activity. Feminists have responded by recognizing power exists in many modalities, and Allen (1998) has argued that women can find themselves ‘both dominated and empowered at the same time and in the context of the same norm, institution, or practice’ (Allen, 1998, p. 31), leading to her suggestion that power should be understood in three separate modes – power-over, power-to and power-with (see Allen, 1999). However far one might accept Foucault’s reading of power as a constitutive force of subjectivity, the fact remains that leadership is in an inherently social process where a leader must have followers, and followers must pay attention to the leader. As such, it is socially far more complex for women to lay claim to agency, to exercise power and to gather followers in order to become a leader, because the ‘to be able to’ part of power is a difficult first step when social affirmation states in so many small ways that women ‘are not able to’. The next section will examine the two Star Trek series which have put women in leadership positions at their core, examining the mode of power and type of  leadership being practised, while also exploring some of the narrative and textual issues that make these female performances of power still at times problematic. The two shows at the centre of this chapter are part of the Star Trek universe, one of science fiction’s most enduring ‘worlds’ in both film and television. Originally a relatively short-lived series, running for three seasons and seventynine episodes between 1966 and 1969, the Star Trek franchise is now over fifty years old with numerous television series and film series to its name. Star Trek:

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The Original Series (TOS), as it is now usually referred to, followed the crew of the Federation starship Enterprise on its ‘five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before’ as the opening narration explained it. Each episode featured the crew, led by Captain James T Kirk (William Shatner), encountering some mysterious object or alien character and saving the day. It was a thought-provoking, optimistic and adventurous vision of the future, and could legitimately lay claim (along with the British Doctor Who) to being the original Cult TV show. As it developed, it proved to be full of Eco’s (1985) ‘organic imperfections’, being ‘wobbly and disjointed’, even ‘gloriously incoherent’ at times, and always eminently quotable. It also fulfils Hill’s definition of a ‘hyperdiegesis’ as a ‘vast and detailed narrative space, only a fraction of which is ever directly seen or encountered within the text’ (Hills, 2002, p. 137). As so often subsequently proved to be the case, Cult TV was at the forefront of change in the television production landscape. In their wide-ranging examination of Star Trek fandom, Jenkins and Tulloch discussed TOS’s paradoxical position of managing to fulfil commissioning network NBC’s new emphasis on quantity, whilst maintaining at least some of its earlier quality ideals (1995, p. 8). However, it was only with the benefit of hindsight that executives began to realize that the fans remained avid long after the show came off the air, if not more so. For even after the final episode in June 1969, partly thanks to its extensive syndication and repeats, the fans did not forget, and continued to campaign on the show’s behalf, leading eventually to Star Trek: the Motion Picture in 1979 (Robert Wise) and subsequent films with the original crew of the Enterprise, and then Star Trek: the Next Generation (1987–94, CBS) set seventy-eight or so years later. In fact, TOS developed into six feature films with the original crew, The Next Generation also added four feature films to its seven seasons on television, Deep Space Nine (1993–9, CBS) also ran for seven seasons, as did Voyager (1995–2001, CBS), while Enterprise (2001–5, CBS) only managed four, but a rebooted film series began in 2009 with Star Trek (JJ Abrams) which established an alternate timeline led by Chris Pine’s younger Captain Kirk (dubbed the Kelvin timeline after the USS Kelvin, whose destruction marked divergence from the timeline of the original series). More recently, Star Trek is back on television, albeit from streaming service CBS All Access with Star Trek: Discovery, and Picard a new series featuring Patrick Stewart returning to his role from TNG, which debuted in early 2020. The fans of Star Trek have been celebrated, made fun of, complained about and analysed many times over the years, but have remained one of the quintessential Cult TV audiences for fifty years and counting.

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Star Trek: Voyager (CBS, 1995–2001) Star Trek: Voyager was the fourth television series for what had by the mid1990s certainly become a franchise. Like Star Trek: TOS, Voyager was created at another time of change for television. If Star Trek: TNG helped television make a transition to the TV II era, as Reeves, Rodgers and Epstein argued in 1996, by 2002 they also considered Star Trek at the forefront of TV III where brand marketing had become the key to differentiating the offering of channels and combatting the fragmentation of audiences. It was a moment in television history where Cult TV in the form of The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Charmed and others were creating audiences for their own new channels. In the same spirit, UPN (United Paramount Network) used Voyager to launch its new channel with a two-hour special, which a solid if not overly excited review from Variety called a ‘classy generation’ (Lowe, 1995a) of the franchise and ‘an impressive, handsomely engineered launch for the United Paramount Network and proves a worthy heir to the legacy of Gene Roddenberry’ (Lowe, 1995b). Indeed, so closely linked was the show to the channel that Voyager’s swansong season came as UPN was morphing into The CW. Although perhaps not quite as popular as some of the other iterations of the show, Voyager was a steady ship that ran for a full seven seasons and 172 episodes. As the show opens, in pursuit of rebels, Voyager and her crew are catapulted into a remote region of space called the Delta Quadrant by a dying alien entity known only as the Caretaker. Forced to incorporate the rebels into a much-reduced crew, Voyager, led by Captain Kathryn Janeway (Kate Mulgrew), begins what promised to be a seventy-five-year journey back home to the Alpha Quadrant. Although like previous Star Treks, Voyager was set on the space ship of the title, the show also trod fresh ground with its very first female lead. Over the years, Star Trek has been subject of both praise and opprobrium for its on-balance progressive representations of minorities and women. In the post Second World War period, at the height of the Cold War, it was remarkably forward-thinking to include both Japanese and Russian officers on the bridge of the Enterprise, and through its representation of aliens and alien cultures the show was able to explore and discuss otherwise taboo subjects. One writer pointed out that TOS and its sequel TNG were both able to explore the ‘pressing social issues of the day – racism and Vietnam in the first series, terrorism and drug addiction in the second’ (Wilcox, 1992, p. 88). However, the show was more mixed in its view of women’s place in this bold progressive future. It has

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been suggested that ‘Gene Roddenberry originally wanted the Spock role to be played by a woman. However, NBC executives in the late 1960s claimed that a woman would not be accepted as commanding and unemotional’ (Selley, 1986, p. 95). Instead, the pilot episode The Cage (which was not broadcast in full till 1988) featured Majel Roddenberry as the otherwise unnamed Number One, First Officer to Jeffrey Hunter’s Captain Pike, but she was still considered too unlikeable, and in the end the lone female on the bridge of the Enterprise became Lt Uhura (Nichelle Nichols), the communications officer, alongside the occasional appearance of Nurse Chapel (Majel Roddenberry) and Yeoman Rand (Grace Lee Whitney). However, the final ever episode of TOS, Turnabout Intruder (3.24) is considered an unforgiveable faux pas in its representation of Janice Lester (Sandra Smith), with Selley noting that it ‘has remained an embarrassment to those associated with the series’ (Selley, 1986, p. 97), an opinion that has not changed over time, with website Den of Geek saying in 2016 that ‘no amount of excusing it on the grounds of it being the 1960s can possibly make up for the portrayal of Dr Janice Lester’ (Harrisson, 2016). In this episode, an ex-lover of Kirk engineers a machine to enable her to switch her mind into Kirk’s body (and vice versa) so that she can become a starship captain because she says, ‘Your world of starship captains doesn’t admit women. It isn’t fair.’ She has according to Kirk ‘driven herself mad with jealousy, hatred and ambition’, and once in the captain’s chair, ‘she proves to be emotionally volatile to the point of irrationality, viciously ordering the executions of all who would mutiny against her’ (Selley, 1986, p. 97). Turnabout Intruder ‘demonstrates female desire for power as a clear sign of insanity’ (Greven, 2009, p. 31). The first-ever female captain to be seen on screen was an unnamed captain of the USS Saratoga in the film Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (Leonard Nimoy, 1986), while TNG supplied the first female captain with a name – in Yesterday’s Enterprise (3.15) Captain Rachel Garrett (Tricia O’Neill), one of Captain Picard’s predecessors at the helm, crashes into the timeline of Picard’s ship. Later in Season 3, Commander Elizabeth Shelby (Elizabeth Dennehy) made an appearance in the two-part story The Best of Both Worlds (3.26 and 4.1). Shelby was an ambitious officer assigned to the Enterprise to assist with a Borg-related attack but only appeared in those two episodes. However she did live on in a series of novels and short stories known as Star Trek: New Frontiers, where she eventually rose to become captain of the USS Trident and then Admiral. The Next Generation had made an effort to include more women on the bridge with Deanna Troi (Marina Sirtis) and Dr Beverley Crusher (Gates McFadden), as

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well as the short-lived Security Chief Tasha Yar (Denise Crosby), but looking at the representation of women in the crews of TOS and TNG, it is clear that while the women were there, they tended to be in traditionally feminine roles – receptionist, and ‘caring’ doctor and counsellor, and, as such, it is evident what a departure Captain Kathryn Janeway really was. The opening two episodes of Voyager are worth examining in some detail, because as well as introducing Janeway, the narrative also makes it clear that she is directly responsible for the ship being stranded seventy-five years away from home. The audience’s first view of the new captain comes early in Caretaker (1.1 and 1.2) where she appears, looming over Tom Paris (Robert Duncan Macneill) a disgraced Star Fleet pilot, now a Federation prisoner (see Figure 16). Janeway’s hands are on her hips in a dominant posture, exaggerated by the low camera angle, which places the audience in Paris’s position, panning from Paris looking up to Janeway. It is almost comically overstated: the mature woman making her position of authority over a younger man extra clear. He is undertaking some kind of manual work, obviously hot, as his overall is undone at the throat and

Figure 16  As they meet for the first time, Voyager’s Captain Janeway (Kathryn Mulgrew) looms over Tom Paris. Star Trek: Voyager, Caretaker (1.1).

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chest, whilst Janeway is in full uniform which includes a polo neck, with her hair swept up into a complex arrangement of curls and twists. It is interesting, however, that the reverse shot, which we might expect to be from Janeway’s point of view (angled down on Paris), is in fact on a level with Paris’s face, and as he stands up the camera gradually shifts with him till it is offering level close-ups of both of them. It then cuts to a long shot of the two of them walking side by side. Janeway has her hands clasped behind her back, military style, while the pointedly relaxed Paris walks in a lazier fashion. It was perhaps accidental, but in this shot, the shorter Janeway has to almost trot along to keep up with the stroll of the much taller Paris. So by the end of the very first scene, Janeway’s claim to authority in terms of staging and body language has already been rather diluted. The Captain is introduced as authoritative, but then the text immediately sets to work softening her, as Janeway’s next scene works hard to normalize her femininity. She is in the captain’s Ready Room aboard Voyager, making final preparations for departure, while talking to her fiancé Mark Johnson on a video screen as Mark gives her the news that her dog is pregnant. They obviously do not share a home together as she then asks him to take her dog home with him while she is away for ‘a few weeks’. She is slightly preoccupied with the ship and he says he’ll sign off and stop bothering her, but she immediately puts aside her tablet and leans up close to the screen insisting that he never bothers her, ‘except in the way I like to be bothered’ as she finishes with a smile. Mark reveals that he has already picked up the dog’s bed, and she gives him a lingering and fond smile before blowing him a kiss. So the audience can be reassured that, although she is a captain, she is also a normal woman, with a normal boyfriend, and, even if she does not have any children, she cares about animals. Later, in The Caretaker episodes, her authority is confirmed by the most obvious rival to her captaincy, the leader of the Maquis rebels and former Starfleet officer Chakotay (Robert Beltran). In what seems to be an all too brief scene between Janeway and Tuvok (Tim Russ), her Vulcan security officer, Janeway makes the fateful decision to destroy the technology of the Caretaker, the alien entity which brought them all to the Delta Quadrant, even though the ‘Array’ appears to be the only way for the crew to get home. Janeway makes a principled decision to destroy the technology in order to protect the Ocampa, an alien species which had been under the protection of the Caretaker saving them from another group of warlike aliens called the Kazon. If Voyager does not act, the Kazon will steal water from the Ocampa and also gain the powerful technology of the Array.

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However, back on board Voyager, the Maquis and the Starfleet crew are already at odds with one another. The Maquis and half Klingon Torres (Roxann Dawson) are furious when Janeway explains that she was not willing to trade the lives of the Ocampa for ‘our convenience’, as she puts it. The two women are framed in a tight two shot, staring at each other as Janeway concludes ‘We’ll have to find another way home.’ Torres is incensed and shouts ‘What other way home is there?’ and appeals to Chakotay, ‘Who is she to be making these decisions for all of us?’, expecting him to join her in the argument, but instead Chakotay grabs Torres by the shoulder and pulls her back, replying with a stern expression ‘She’s the captain’. Tuvok interrupts to announce the destruction devices are in position. The camera, slightly below and tilted up, zooms in to an even tighter close-up of Janeway’s face, one half in shadow as she resolutely says ‘Fire’. In this crucial scene, Janeway’s authority is reaffirmed by both Chakotay and the camera. Janeway’s captaincy is affirmed by the text in other ways too. Like all of the Star Trek Captains, Janeway has the privilege of the voiceover in the form of the captain’s log, a useful device for diegetic narration that allows for an introduction or a quick recap for the audience. In real life, the captain’s log was a historical practice drawn from sailing ships, where the daily routines and events of life aboard ship were entered in a book by the captain, forming an official record of the voyage but it was a tradition that Star Trek took up for the sf world of the United Federation of Planets. Here, the captain’s log forms an important audio trope for the series, as recognizable as the theme music. It is the captain speaking, usually in a voiceover, but it is also the captain’s point of view, giving their words the weight of official authority within the narrative world, but also within the narration of the audiovisual text itself. As Chion argued, the voiceover is rare, usually held in reserve for certain characters and only granted for a limited time, while as discussed in the previous chapter, the female voiceover, particularly the ‘empowered’ female voice, is even rarer, but Captain Janeway is a notable exception – her captain’s log reinforces the Captain’s viewpoint as an authoritative source of narrative and psychological truth (Butkus, 2012, p. 185). Janeway’s voice becomes the voice that speaks for the ship, but also informs the audience of developments, while the sound quality itself – ‘its placement – a certain sound quality, a way of occupying space, a sense of proximity to the spectator’s ear, and a particular manner of engaging the spectator’s identification’ (Chion, 1999, p. 49) marks the entries of the captain’s log of particular importance in developing Janeway’s authority. She speaks for the ship and speaks to the audience.

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It was important to establish Janeway as an authoritative figure as there was a perceived job of work to be done in persuading audiences to accept Janeway as the Captain. As Mulgrew herself said in 2003, I was of childbearing age when I took this job. I was thirty-eight years old. It was the first time a woman had attempted this. There was a lot at stake at Paramount. The main demographic, as I’m sure you’re well aware, are young men between the ages of fifteen and thirty. What they didn’t want to see in the Captain’s seat was their mother. So it became my mission to win them over via my captaincy. Via my command. (Totally Kate, 2003a)

However, the anxiety around this ‘unusual’ position of a woman in command leaked out in a specific way. Janeway is in charge, but she is also a woman and so needs to be feminine, but she is in charge so cannot be too sexy, but neither can she be seen as too motherly. It was Janeway’s hair that became the battleground for this tangle of representation. As Russo pointed out, ‘Powerful women are ensnared in a double bind: the gendered expectations of their careers and their appearance are all but irreconcilable’ resulting in a situation where hair comes to bear ‘a disproportionate share of the burden for representing and negotiating their position’ (Russo, 2007, p. 167) and ‘the whole convoluted history of gender, sexuality and the mass media can be reduced to a neat equation: long hair = feminine and straight, short hair = butch and lesbian’ (Russo, 2007, p. 169). Mulgrew herself was aware of this, being called to comment on it at regular intervals and at a conference in London in 2003; when asked about her hair, she replied: They were so concerned that the first female captain might not stand up to the plate … In order to target their anxiety, they had to choose something that was benign enough to cover the truth, which was that I was a woman and would men watch a woman captain and would they go for it? So what did they fool around with? My hair. How many hair-dos did I have in the first three seasons? Forty! (Totally Kate, 2003b)

When asked a similar question at a conference in Sacramento in the same year, she said ‘Fifty-two!’ (Totally Kate, 2003a). It was certainly more than the bald Captain Picard, as Mulgrew also pointed out. The website Trek.fm, writing in 2011, boiled it down to seven hairstyles, ranging from the ‘bun of steel’ as the style from the first two seasons was dubbed, to the ‘shoulder warmer’ bob which had two iterations one wavy, one straight and sleek, via pony tails, French twists and all points in between (Schmiedt, 2011). If Janeway’s hair was a marker of anxiety over her role as captain, there was also some apprehension over what an off-duty Janeway might be doing. It was

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seen as problematic for the Captain to socialize with the crew (as The Cloud (1.6) made clear) and so in Seasons 1 and 2, Janeway is seen spending time alone in the holosuite: a three-dimensional virtual reality space in which crew members could relax and interact with holographic projections. Voyager introduced the idea of a ‘holonovel’ and Janeway’s Lamda One programme first appears in Cathexis (1.13) where her choice of relaxation turns out to be a period gothic novel, in which she plays governess to the children of Lord Burleigh, complete with a large crinoline dress. Murray (2017) points out that the holodeck is often used in Star Trek to ‘reveal unexpected sides of familiar characters’ where Captain Picard, the highly cultured captain, enjoys Film Noir, for example. She also points out that, unlike the off duty choices of the male characters, Janeway Lamda One is not focused on a violent central conflict such as Tom Paris’s black and white ‘Captain Proton’ stories (which Murray does not mention), but is instead ‘a more leisurely and open ended exploration of the Burleigh household’ (Murray, 2017, p. 18). The ‘unexpected’ side of Janeway is that she seems to enjoy womanly pursuits in a leisurely story that does not involve physical action but rather one requiring emotional intuition and a caring role. Once again, viewers could be reassured that Janeway was appropriately feminine despite being a Captain. However by the end of Season 3 (Scorpion, 3.26), Janeway is busy instead collaborating with a holographic Leonardo da Vinci in his workshop, a pastime perhaps more true to the Janeway who was a former Science Officer. Janeway’s style as Captain was morally autocratic. As already discussed, it was Janeway’s command decision to destroy the Caretaker’s array that stranded both Voyager and the Maquis in the Delta Quadrant in the first place. In Phage (1.5) she is furious but utterly adamant that she cannot take back the stolen body parts from the Vidiians, even though it may doom adopted crewmember Neelix (Ethan Phillips) to the equivalent of a twenty-fourth-century iron lung for life. In Prime Factors (1.10) she is horrified to discover that Tuvok sanctioned a theft of technology that they had failed to acquire through legal means, because, as he explains to Janeway, her ‘standards would not allow you to violate Sikarian law. Someone had to spare you the ethical dilemma’. Janeway is horrified. In Alliances (2.14) she spells it out once again, telling her senior crew, some of whom would have her make a deal with the chaotic and violent Kazon: In a part of space where there are few rules, it’s more important than ever that we hold fast to our own. In a region where shifting allegiances are commonplace we have to have something stable to rely on. And we do. The principles and ideals of the Federation. As far as I’m concerned, those are the best allies we could have.

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Her moral certainty is demonstrated all over again in Equinox Parts 1 and 2 (5.26 and 6.1) where Janeway actually fires on a fellow Starfleet vessel, the Equinox, which was also stranded in the Delta Quadrant because of the Caretaker. Equinox was using bioenergy from murdered alien beings to fuel the ship to enhance their warp drive capabilities and get them home faster, but the ship has abandoned almost all Starfleet protocols in the process. Janeway is adamant this is not the path for Voyager. Upholding the values and regulations of Starfleet at whatever cost to her own crew is emphasized time and again within the narrative, with what Hark refers to as an almost ‘suicidal mania’ (Hark, 2008, p. 120). This rigid insistence on adherence to Starfleet regulations, however, can be seen as quite logical if it is remembered that Janeway’s leadership authority is position-based and assigned. In other words, she was given the command of Voyager by the quasi-military organization The United Federation of Planets, by succeeding at the Starfleet Academy and working her way up the chain of command to achieve the assigned rank of Captain through her learned skills and competencies. The role of captain is also a traditional ‘command and control’ style of leadership and her authority stems from the Federation and its hierarchy. After Voyager is marooned in the Delta Quadrant, her leadership could potentially be in doubt, especially with the rebel Maquis crew, who are not bound by Starfleet conventions, but this is why Chakotay’s explicit acquiescence to her captaincy in the opening storyline is so crucial. The unitary nature of leadership remains the norm. Janeway certainly has no concept of ‘shared leadership’ – there is never any question of Janeway and Chakotay joining forces in that way. She is the captain and she remains in sole charge of the ship. In fact, Janeway might be considered actively hostile to the notion of collective leadership at least as evidenced by her interactions with the Borg Queen (such as Dark Frontier 5.15 and 5.16) and her attempts to rehabilitate the rescued Borg drone Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan). So, given the narrative positioning of the ship and her crew, Janeway’s firm adherence to the rules of the Federation and Starfleet is readily comprehensible since they are the source of her authority. If she steps away from Federation rules, it weakens her assigned and positional leadership. However, as the story develops, Janeway’s leadership becomes ever more results based and hinges on her ability to get the ship and the crew back to the Alpha Quadrant. Understanding this may make the series finale in Endgame Parts 1 and 2 (7.25 and 7.26) more palatable, because otherwise, given the points just made, it seems entirely out of character. In fact, it is a narrative sleight of hand that offers the audience two possible endings for Voyager and her crew,

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with two versions of Janeway where she is able to both stick to the rules and break them, rather as Sabrina was able to be crowned Queen of Hell and stay at home in Chapter 3. The first version shows the results of Janeway’s ‘stick to the rules’ approach. It is the ten-year anniversary of Voyager’s return to the Alpha Quadrant, but Admiral Janeway is still mourning the death of Chakotay who died of a broken heart after Seven of Nine became an away mission casualty. It is also revealed that Tuvok had a slowly developing medical condition that led to irrevocable senility. He could have been treated if they had returned sooner, but in this version it took twenty-three years to return and twenty-two crew members died along the way. As Bowring put it, this version demonstrated ‘the apparent end result of feminine leadership; a bitter old woman willing to compromise her ethics and her sense of self ’ where her ‘emotion and intuition have become her undoing’ (Bowring, 2004, p. 394). And so the ‘stick to the rules’ Janeway decides the cost has been too high and determines a new course of action, one that violates the Temporal Prime Directive, which forbids interfering in historical events to change outcomes. The stern, moral autocrat Janeway has decided to break one of the biggest rules of Starfleet (after the Prime Directive itself which forbids any contact with preWarp drive civilizations). What is more surprising is that Captain Janeway eventually agrees to a modified version of Admiral Janeway’s renegade plan, after the Admiral suggests that Temporal Prime Directive is ‘less of a headache if you just ignore it!’ The modified plan also involves the ‘not very Starfleet’ deployment of a biological weapon leading to the possible genocide of the Borg in order to allow Voyager’s passage through a Borg transwarp hub. Admiral Janeway sacrifices herself to deliver the biological agents to the Borg Queen, which dissolves the communication connections of the Collective and allows Captain Janeway to get her crew (magically) home immediately with her ethics more or less intact. This was a neat, if not entirely satisfying, trick that brought the series to a sudden conclusion, with Janeway abruptly succeeding in her results driven leadership role. In the end, Janeway was quite a conventional captain and leader: assigned, position and results based, perhaps some extent transformational in giving the crew a goal of returning home, but nothing too radical. Just being a woman in that role seemed to be fantastic enough (in both senses of the word) for the late 1990s. Coming sixteen years later and the first Star Trek back on the small screen since the demise of Enterprise in 2005, there was a lot riding on the franchise’s second attempt at putting a woman at the centre of a Star Trek story.

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Star Trek: Discovery (CBS All Access, 2017–ongoing) Star Trek: Discovery’s opening action was set after Enterprise and about ten years before TOS when the Federation is at war with the Klingon Empire. Discovery was different to previous iterations of the franchise, principally because it was designed for a subscriber channel CBS All Access rather than for the network itself, so once again we see Star Trek being used as the vanguard to launch a new channel. Speaking in 2017, Executive Producer Alex Kurtzman made it clear that although the departure of original showrunner Bryan Fuller was one cause of delay in getting the show on the air, it was also a desire to do things to the highest standard in order to entice subscribers. Comparing Discovery to Game of Thrones and Westworld (both HBO productions), he pointed out, ‘We have to deliver that level of spectacle and experience so the audience feels that this isn’t something they could get on network television’ (Goldberg, 2017a). The streaming model also meant that it could contain more adult themes as well as swearing, and it is clear the writing team learned from other ‘long form’ box set style drama of the type most popular on streaming sites by developing an overarching storyline for the full series, rather than individually discrete episodes. Discovery proved an immediate success for the digital channel and after only six episodes was officially renewed for a second season, with a third series confirmed soon after the second season began airing. The head of CBS Interactive said, ‘In just six episodes, Star Trek: Discovery has driven subscriber growth, critical acclaim and huge global fan interest for the first premium version of this great franchise’ (Goldberg, 2017b) – a rousing endorsement for a series that took so long to come to fruition. The series also managed to walk a tight rope of being new, but respecting long-time fans. The theme tune, for example, included the original Star Trek fanfare, and the final episode of the first season ended with Discovery answering a distress call from the Enterprise herself, captained by Christopher Pike, the captain from the TOS pilot episode The Cage. When the credits ran, the music was the original Star Trek theme music. The relationship between TOS and Discovery seems to re-state the ‘wobbly and disjointed’ nature of the show’s timeline and continuity. Discovery (like Enterprise) is set before TOS and, as a consequence, incorporates characters like Captain Pike played in Discovery by Anson Mount though originally played by Jeffrey Hunter in 1965. Discovery also makes use of a younger Spock (Ethan Peck), the famously logical Vulcan First Officer played by Leonard Nimoy in TOS. The Discovery episode If Memory Serves (2.8) even featured a direct call back to The Cage, using footage from the original show

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in a ‘Previously on Star Trek: Discovery … ’ sequence. As one website put it, ‘Star Trek is a world where anything could happen because … physics. There’s a Prime timeline, a Kelvin one, the Mirror Dimension and more time travelling and universe hopping than several other shows combined’ (Hurley, 2018). With the third season time hopping 900 years into the future, it remains ‘gloriously incoherent’, easily maintaining its position as an ideal Cult TV text. However, Star Trek Discovery also broke new ground. It is the second Star Trek series to have a woman as a central character, and the first to place an AfricanAmerican woman in the lead role. It is also the first Star Trek series that does not place a captain in the central role. All the iterations of Star Trek have been at least to some extent ensemble dramas, but they were all built around their captain. In Discovery, it is First Officer Michael Burnham (Sonequa MartinGreen) around whom the main action and the narrative arc of each season revolves, but I have placed the show in this chapter on command because in the first season, in an unprecedented move, no less than five women are in leadership or potential leadership roles. The show uniquely offers a variety of female characters all at different stages of what might be called a leadership journey and like Wynonna Earp, rather than just one or two strong female characters, there are many in the narrative mix, giving it a depth on this issue that has rarely been seen. Michael Burnham is introduced with less of a fanfare than Janeway, in fact the audience hear her before she is seen. ‘We come in peace’, she says in The Vulcan Hello (1.1). ‘That’s why we’re here. Isn’t that the whole idea of Starfleet?’ she continues, as the camera cranes up over an immense desert landscape and moves swiftly forward towards two small figures walking through what appears to be the middle of nowhere. This is Burnham, on a covert field mission to restore water to a well for a pre-Warp civilization, with her captain and mentor Philippa Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh). Burnham is her First Officer aboard the USS Shenzhou. Georgiou wants Burnham to aspire to her own command and is in fact recommending it as she replies. They have served seven years together and are clearly old friends and comrades. Burnham’s Vulcan education is made evident through her overly precise estimation of when the storm threatening along their horizon will arrive, incorrectly as it turns out. When their communications are disrupted as a result of the storm, Georgiou works quickly to walk a message into the sand so Discovery can drop into the atmosphere and pick them up. Unlike Janeway, Burnham is not a fully formed leader and still has a lot to learn, but we do get the First Officer’s log voiceover immediately after credits, just to establish that her character is our guide through the story. The

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log is more rarely used in Discovery than other iterations of the show, perhaps because Burnham is not the captain. Burnham is given a complex back story that is gradually revealed across the first two seasons. She is daughter of human scientists killed by Klingons and raised by the Vulcan Ambassador Sarek and his wife Amanda Grayson, who were familiar figures to fans as the parents of Spock in TOS. So Burnham is a human with a traumatic past, with a Vulcan education, who represses her emotion in favour of logic and rationality, but in the early scenes on the bridge of the Shenzhou she seems happy in her work, noting with optimism that the binary stars she observes are busy forming planets that future generations will call home. ‘A humbling reminder’, she concludes, ‘that all life is born from chaos.’ Burnham and the crew seem content and productive under the command of Georgiou. Of course such optimism is short lived as their mission begins to dissolve into danger and confusion, as Burnham makes some catastrophic decisions, leading to the Battle of the Binary Stars and the start of a Federation war with the Klingons. Although it is accidental that she is the one who disturbs the Klingons’ sacred beacon and an act of self-defence which kills the ‘Torchbearer’, it is her subsequent obsession with the Klingon threat, reinforced her by knowledge of the Vulcan’s policy of ‘shoot first’ when encountering any Klingons, that leads her to disobey her captain, who has been insisting ‘We don’t start shooting on a hunch’. In an act of mutiny, Burnham renders the captain unconscious with a Vulcan nerve pinch and attempts to take command of the Shenzhou. This act of mutiny means that by the end of the first episode Burnham has gone from being a Starfleet officer with a promising career to a prisoner convicted of mutiny and destined for a lifetime in prison. The rest of Season 1 follows her path to redemption and reinstatement when the ambiguous Captain Lorca (Jason Isaacs) of the science ship Discovery intercepts her prison shuttle and coopts her to work on their experimental propulsion system. Burnham is an interesting character who is brave, clever and physically active, though in some ways, she is not a terribly feminine heroine. She has a man’s name, short hair and a uniform that looks like a tracksuit, but she has depth and complexity, with many facets to her character that make her an engaging guide through the narrative, although some fans dubbed her ‘Michael Boring’ and feared that she was too unlikeable to carry the show (‘I quite like Discovery’, 2017), an unexpected call back to the concerns about the original Number One in The Cage. And there is another narrative thread where her status as a heroine is treated in an all too familiar way. The emotionally dry Burnham

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gradually falls for Ash Tyler (Shazad Latif) who appeared to be a survivor of Klingon capture and torture who has become Discovery’s security officer. In The Wolf Inside (1.11) the two are alone in the Mirror Universe and finally consummate their attraction to each other. However this is also the moment at which Tyler’s persona finally gives way to that of Voq, a Klingon sleeper agent, surgically, genetically and psychologically altered to appear human. His conditioning breaks down as he remembers that Michael is the one who killed his leader T’Kuvma, resulting in Ash/Voq attempting to murder Burnham (see Figure 17). Like Buffy, sex makes Michael’s lover uncontrollably violent. Rank is no protector of the ‘punished for sex/love’ narrative reversal, as the same thing happens to Admiral Katrina Cornwell (Jayne Brook). In Lethe (1.6), Cornwell reveals, she and Captain Lorca are more than just old friends. She is concerned about his mental health (having been a counsellor at one time) but then she sleeps with him, which seems rather a risky thing for someone in a position of command to do with a subordinate whose mental state she has some reason to question. However, on trying to awaken him in the morning, he responds by grabbing her by the throat and pointing a phaser at her. Later in the same episode, she goes on a diplomatic mission and is captured by the Klingons and tortured for information. As Pratt pointed out, ‘When women heroes do seek erotic freedom, which we define simply as the right to make love when and with whom they wish, they meet all the opposition of the patriarchy’ (Pratt, 1981, p. 24). It seems the writers cannot resist using an erotic relationship as a form of

Figure 17  Shortly after they become lovers, Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) is attacked by Ash/Voq (Shazad Latif). Star Trek: Discovery, The Wolf Inside (1.11).

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attack against their female heroes and leaders, and time after time the result of physical intimacy is life-threatening violence. As already noted, where Janeway was the finished article, already a captain, by way of contrast Burnham spent three seasons emerging as a leader. Beginning as First Officer, then Commander in the science division, even spending time out of Star Fleet itself, finally in Season 3, she is officially offered and accepts the position of captain of the Discovery. It is a long road from the emotionally distant Burnham of the Shenzhou, to the smiling Burnham who takes her seat in the Captain’s chair to the obvious approval of the crew. However, the resolution of the Klingon storyline in Season 1 offered a swifter evolution of a leadership arc. As the opening scene pulls out from what seems to be space to reveal that the shot was in fact the interior of an eye, the opening of the first episode features the words of T’Kuvma (Chris Obi), a Klingon visionary who wishes to unite the warring factions into a Klingon Empire to resist the Federation. The Klingons are fully represented in this story. As Alex Kurtzman made clear: For me, at the core of Star Trek is the idea that Starfleet’s mission is to understand the other, or what is perceived as the other. To use a word that may seem ironic, our approach was to humanize the Klingons, meaning we know a lot about them. In a moment when we are living in a world where ideologies are so polarized and polarizing, what I did not want to do was just make them the bad guys. I was not interested in doing that version of the show. (Shannon Miller, 2017)

It was also a production decision to have Klingons speak in Klingon most of the time. So Season 1 worked to characterize the Klingons with more nuance, and part of that was in the character of L’Rell (Mary Chieffo). L’Rell, a daughter of two Klingon houses, is a follower of T’kuvma, part of his inner circle and present from Episode 1. When T’kuvma announces victory in The Battle of the Binary Stars (1.2), she and Voq stand either side of their leader. L’Rell represents the first time a non-human other than Spock has a full narrative arc, albeit one that happens quietly. If Burnham is on a journey, so is L’Rell, and although she is set up as Burnham’s antagonist, unusually their character development leads them towards allyship rather than conflict. In her early scenes, she is in the background, with few lines, but is persistently present. When T’Kuvma is killed by Burnham (who was supposed to be taking him prisoner), L’Rell stands with Voq to take forward their fallen leader’s message of unity. When the other Houses refuse to accept Voq as their leader, L’Rell develops a new plan, turning Voq into the human seeming Tyler. She conspires with another female

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leader Admiral Katrina Cornwell to defect to the Federation, unhappy with the self-serving direction that the other Klingon Houses are moving. Finally, she is given the power to end the war itself. It seems easier to imagine a complete journey to leadership and power for an alien female than for a human one. When Discovery returns to its own universe, complete with the knowledge of how to overcome Klingon cloaking devices, they find that they have been away for nine months and that although the Klingons are not fighting as one, the Federation is still on the brink of defeat. A desperate Cornwell confronts L’Rell asking what will end the war, to which L’Rell replies that the war can never end until the Klingons are conquered. Meantime Burnham consults the Terran Emperor, the mirror universe version of Georgiou, who was leader of the fascistic Terran Empire (another female leader in the series). Eventually, the former Emperor reveals how she defeated the Klingons in her own universe: by destroying the Klingon homeworld. Desperation is leading Starfleet into some dark places. An angry Burnham confronts a holographic Cornwell on the bridge of Discovery with the crew watching. Cornwell is adamant ‘We do not have the luxury of principle’, but Burnham, echoing Janeway, snaps back ‘It is all we have!’ The camera moves around the bridge, offering reaction shots from the crew watching Burnham as she makes her speech, concluding with ‘Do we need a mutiny today, to prove who we are?’ The alien First Officer Saru (Doug Jones) is the first to stand up ‘We are Starfleet’, he announces, and one by one the rest of the bridge crew stand up too. Burnham is the leader who emerges to articulate the goals of their organization and as such they do not hesitate to stand with her. Burnham’s moral leadership here confirmed by the male alien Saru, but also the rest of bridge crew and it overpowers Cornwell’s ‘command and control’ position. Back on the Klingon homeworld of Qo’noS, Burnham persuades the Terran Georgiou to hand over the bomb detonator, but with an audacious plan in mind that will not leave the planet a heap of cinders. In a series of close-ups, Burnham offers the detonator to L’Rell, who responds, ‘But I am no one.’ L’Rell was always a follower who expressly said she did not wish to take up the mantle of leadership, ready to follow T’Kuvma’s pick of Voq as his successor, then spent many episodes in a prison cell aboard Discovery. It is left to Voq/Ash to persuade her, telling her, ‘It is time for you to leave the shadows.’ L’Rell goes to address the leaders of the Klingon great houses in an amphitheatre-like cave, announcing that she is the leader to take T’Kuvma’s place. Their response is to laugh at her, until she reveals the detonator. ‘The reunification of our race begins now’, she

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concludes in a tight close up, to silence from the assembled leaders, and the next shot is of the Klingon ships leaving Earth’s orbit. A voiceover from Burnham then begins, extolling the Klingon journey from darkness into light, as the camera flies in through Earth’s atmosphere to the Federation’s headquarters. Burnham addresses the crew of the Discovery and the Federation elders, including Admiral Cornwell on the subject of principles and echoes T’kuvma in telling them, as the music rises, that ‘we have to be torchbearers casting the light so we may see the path to lasting peace’. It is notable that the series ends with Burnham and L’Rell, both addressing their respective people and demanding that they both be true to their values and principles. Together, with the help of Cornwell and the Discovery crew, they created a communitas for peace and charted different outcome to the question of war. Unlike Janeway and Cornwell, Burnham and L’Rell’s leadership is not position based (that is stemming from an institution) but is emergent and transformational and perhaps the more powerful because of it. L’Rell returned in a smaller role in Season 2, struggling with the realities of leadership. She is now the Klingon Chancellor, but her appearance is more feminized. She has long hair – apparently Klingons shave their heads in times of war – as well as dresses rather than armour, and even painted nails. She also reveals that she had a child by Voq, which makes her vulnerable to political pressure and assassination attempts. Motherhood does not appear to be compatible with wielding power. Terran Georgiou also returns in Season 2 where she seems to have settled into a role with Starfleet’s shadowy Section 31, a security and intelligence branch of the organization. And Admiral Cornwell’s story comes to an end in Such Sweet Sorrow (2.14) when she sacrifices herself to save the Enterprise and its crew by staying within a bulkhead to close the door from within as a missile detonates. There is, however, one more character of interest: junior in rank and experience to Burnham, nonetheless Sylvia Tilly (Mary Wiseman) has proved popular with fans. Cadet Tilly is described in the Star Trek database as a ‘freshly minted cadet’ who is ‘wide-eyed, good-natured and full of nervous excitement’ (Startrek.com, no date). She snores, which is why she wasn’t expecting a roommate when Burnham is assigned to her quarters in Context Is for Kings (1.3). She is noticeably more curvaceous than the rest of the crew and is shown having to train to improve her fitness. In Lethe (1.6), Burnham is shown as Tilly’s mentor, encouraging her to train harder physically to get extra points at the Academy. In terms of mise en scène, Tilly is usually neat, but it often seems like more of an effort for her than other crew members, even other relatively

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junior crew like the pilot Detmer (Emily Coutts). Tilly’s long curly red hair is often scraped back into a (presumably) regulation bun, but in Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad (1.7) it bursts out to full exuberance when the crew are relaxing at a party, a little like Tilly herself, of course. She talks too much, is too enthusiastic and says things that others don’t or won’t but is also socially brave, choosing to befriend Burnham, and then welcoming Ash/Voq back to the crew by moving to sit with him in the canteen in The War without, The War within (1.14). She is more quirky and excitable than previous Star Trek ‘youngsters’ like Wesley Crusher (Wil Wheaton) in TNG or Naomi Wildman (Scarlett Pomers) in Voyager but she is also ferociously clever and ambitious. As she states at the end of her first episode, ‘Here’s something not a lot of people know about me: I’m going to be a Captain someday.’ In Despite Yourself (1.10) a different side Tilly is revealed when she is forced to impersonate the Mirror Captain of the Discovery and find a much tougher persona – she must become the ‘Slayer of Sorna Prime’, the ‘Witch of Wurna Minor’ and ‘Captain Killy’. ‘I’m nothing like her, Michael’, she tells her friend. ‘She’s terrifying, she’s … she’s like a twisted version of everything I’ve ever aspired to be. I’m gonna have nightmares about myself now’. But the mirror Georgiou is a fan of the Terran Tilly as a fellow killer, and insists she comes on the away mission to Qo’noS in Will You Take My Hand (1.15). Tilly is adamant ‘I’m not that Tilly’, she insists. ‘Don’t be so sure, Killy’, replies the Terran Emperor. It is Tilly in Season 1 who discovers that the drone supposedly set to map the Klingon homeworld is really a bomb, and in the final episode (1.15) she is awarded a Medal of Honour with the rest of the Discovery crew and promoted to Ensign. She is also officially placed on the ‘command track’ by Admiral Cornwell. Tilly also featured in a pre-season Short Trek episode called Runaway in which she finds a stowaway alien entity on Discovery and helps her find her courage to return home, where it turns out she is about to be crowned Queen. Tilly finds her own courage to pay less attention to her mother’s discouraging opinions and move forward with her command training. In Season 2, Tilly continues to play an important role in the engineering and science departments, and is part of a nascent but increasingly present clique of bridge officers in the form of Airiam (Sarah Mitich), Owosekun (Oyin Oladejo) and Detmer, most clearly seen in Project Daedalus (2.9) sharing a meal. After their time jump forward, Tilly’s leadership abilities are further tested, but early in Season 4 she chooses to leave Discovery in favour of a teaching position, thus pivoting to a more traditionally feminine leadership role.

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Tilly has divided opinions amongst the fans with some finding her irritating but others coming to appreciate her energy and humanity. Fan fiction has been quick to pick up on her and Michael’s relationship, but have also shipped her with Captain Pike, Admiral Cornwell and her immediate boss, Paul Stamets (Anthony Rapp) a (gay) scientist aboard Discovery (Archiveofourown.org, no date). Discovery places an African-American woman at the centre of the drama, an overdue first, but the show also creates a wide range of female characters at various levels of command, from cadet to admiral, thus going some way to normalizing the images of women in such positions in a way rarely seen even in fantasy television. Although some of the figures examined in this book have become relatively commonplace (witches and warriors, for example), when it comes to women with real power imagination seems to have run out of road, a concern when we are talking about fantasy. However, it may be that the fundamental problem is less to do with how women are imagined per se – do women need to be more ‘masculine’ to lead? – and more to do with the conception of the ‘great leader’ itself and its close association with the solo hero of old. If the goal of fantasy is to reimagine and play with the possibilities of consensual reality, then the greater reach of the imagination in this case might be to stretch towards imagining, not just a female (or a non-white, or a disabled) leader, but a different form of command itself. Or to push the question of leadership even more radically, could we imagine a different kind of subject who does not need a leader at all. As such, I would suggest there are two directions that writers and creators might turn their attention. Firstly to consider more deeply the role of the leader. What do leaders actually do and why do we need them to do it? In this scenario a ‘better’ type of leader might emerge, one that is less dependent on those ‘masculine’ values of independence, toughness and strength for success, towards one who values more ‘feminine’ values of cooperation and flexibility paired with emotional dexterity. A shift from transactional leadership or ‘command and control’ authoritarian styles towards greater acceptance of transformational and facilitative leadership. This would depict a gentler, kinder leader, but a leader nonetheless. Star Trek and Doctor Who would appear to be moving this direction. The second direction that those of a creative mind set might explore is more radical: the alternative of no longer requiring leadership at all. Some have argued that consideration of leaders and leadership traits ‘are woven into a powerful social myth, which while serving to maintain the status quo, also paradoxically sows the seeds of its own destruction by accentuating helplessness, mindlessness, emotionlessness and meaninglessness’ (Gemmill &

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Oakley, 1992, p. 115). A leader is a figure that is already largely fantasy, created as a psychological dynamic between those searching for someone to shoulder responsibility, and an individual willing to shoulder both responsibility and the emotional projection of followers. You cannot have a leader without followers, but as a consequence leadership must be constantly performed and constantly (re)negotiated. It is a co-construction but one Gemmill and Oakley went so far as to call a ‘psychic prison’ (1992, p. 114), a co-constructed and regressive social myth, which requires ‘non leaders’ to be in the psychological position of a child needing an authoritarian parent. Leaders in such a scenario might be seen as creating more problems than they actually solve and the endless retelling of hero-centric narratives, even those where the hero might be female, also peddles the idea that all ordinary members of society need do is wait for a hero/leader to come forward and tell them what to do, and until then nothing need be done. It is all some else’s problem. But myths can be reworked and what better place to play with new possibilities than in the realms of fantasy? Thus, writers might explore narrative possibilities where collective responsibility, or distributed leadership as some academics have called it, are developed and where the actions of groups of people create change – not one hero, but an association; not extraordinary, but ordinary; not through hierarchy but through distributed power. In contemporary times, such collective responsibility might be seen as a greater priority than ever, where we need to understand what we can all do to make the world a better place, or even more acutely perhaps just maintain an environment that can sustain human life. The magically strong hero who can individually save the day has little to offer in the face of global warming and all-encompassing environmental catastrophe. So this second direction moves towards imagining stories where the answer does not come in the form of an exceptional individual, but rather in the form of collective solidarity. What if instead of imagining ever more powerful, more charismatic, more irresistible leaders (superheroes and magical beings) we imagined the kind of subject (human beings with agency) who did not need a leader to tell them what to do and then force them to do it? What if power was imagined in a different modality where it moves laterally rather than vertically? What if it were possible to imagine collective leadership with a focus on coalition building and groups taking responsibility for themselves? What if rather than a parent/child dynamic, a peer-to-peer adult relationship was possible? Too far fetched? Too idealistic, and utopian even? Yes, of course, but isn’t that what is fantasy for – to blur the boundaries between consensual reality and the possibilities of creative imagination, even if dystopia seems easier to

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imagine than utopia. But at one time surely a black woman on the bridge of ship, never mind a space ship, would have seemed too far fetched? And Star Trek: Discovery is tentatively treading new ground, for the Discovery crew have not been welded to the hand of a single captain. They have had a bad captain in the form of Gabriel Lorca and a good captain in the form of Christopher Pike, and a series of temporary captains like Saru and Admiral Cornwell, but it is the crew’s solidarity with each other that is thrown into focus at the end of Season 2 when they decide to remain with a still captainless ship to leap forward in time. Is it loyalty to Burnham that prompts this move? Is it inevitable that Burnham becomes their captain? Or could it be seen as loyalty to each other and their identity as the crew of Discovery?

Coda: To boldly go …

The stories we tell ourselves matter. In contemporary Western culture our consumption of audiovisual fiction partly shapes how we see the world and our place within it. Cult TV has evolved as a composite phenomenon which creates a rare ludic space where consensual reality and fantasy meet as equals, opening up imagination to the possibility of doing things differently. It is a type of drama that can be rambling and sprawling but as a result offers its audience nooks and crannies to inhabit and ideas to play with, allowing them to recreate their own stories and images, full of a ‘psychological savour’ that speaks to them very deeply. The liminality of the texts, with one foot in consensual reality and one foot in pure fantasy, mimics what Jung called the transcendent function of the psyche, suggesting that part of the attraction of this type of television lies in its role as a playground of the psyche, where audiences have permission to encounter different ways of being and thinking, where ideas and concepts can be played with, examined, pondered, ornamented, dreamed around and at length integrated once more into more conscious ways of functioning. Framing fan activity with these Jungian ideas of the transcendent function and active imagination suggest that such activities are a natural part of psychological activity. But what of our heroines? At the start of the twenty-first century there seemed to be an ever-increasing number of heroines leaping across the small screens of Britain and America. These heroic women (more often young than mature) were not an entirely new invention, but their sheer number did eventually become cause for comment. Academics noticed and celebrated these series, but as well as an increasing body of work on Cult TV, focusing on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The X-Files in particular, there were also a variety of surveys of ‘tough women’ or ‘warrior girls’ more generally. Into the second decade of the twenty-first century the number of fantasy-based TV shows grew again. The ‘external environment’ of business had

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noticed the power of such shows and was chasing new hits, but, as this study of Cult TV heroines shows, this resulted in a truncated form of fantasy, a circumscribed form of fantasy, a form of fantasy fenced in by the industrial nature of television production and its place as commodified entertainment in search of audiences and profits. It is paradoxically both encouraged by technological innovation and enclosed by it. The ludic space of Cult TV cannot push too far forward into uncharted regions of the imagination, far from the everyday world of consensual reality before it is pulled back into conservative safety. Nonetheless, there have been enough tentative steps into the unexplored borderlands to cause audiences to seize these worlds led by heroic female protagonists and be drawn into those activities and behaviours of their own active imagination. The heroines too demonstrate paradoxical behaviours of rebellion and acquiescence. The generally younger, slim and able-bodied heroines do not deeply challenge patriarchal benchmarks of attractiveness. Too often their power is constrained or unwanted; in fact the more powerful they are, the more of an outsider they become. And too often the heroine is alone, surrounded by men, or lacking in a communitas where loyalty and support stretches vertically to include older women as well as horizontally amongst contemporaries. The fantasy end of Cult TV interfaces with imaginative flights of fancy of what could be, but its ability to fly is curtailed by the clipped wings of capitalist ideology, the necessities of servicing at least some of the usual realist style and the requirements of mainstream corporate production. And yet despite everything, glimmers of difference show through. These heroines opened up our imaginations to embrace a Mrs Peel always so cool under fire; the unearthly but powerful Sapphire; the fiercely intelligent Scully; the witches striving to claim agency while protecting their domestic space on their own terms; the embattled warriors, so often punished by their lovers, but like Buffy and Wynonna, persevering; the unstable hybrids afraid of their own power, afraid they might be the ‘bad guys’, but finding ways to balance both sides of their nature; and the leaders who pull their communities together. The more recent shows are finding ways to resolve their narratives in fresh and unexpected ways. Sabrina found a way to bring her two communities together to save the day (both good and evil); Wynonna Earp won over to her cause the revenants her family had been murdering for generations; Jessica Jones was at last able to move forward as an autonomous individual, responsible for herself and the consequences of her actions; Star Trek: Discovery allowed diplomacy and negotiation to resolve conflict, before bestowing formal leadership. The heroines are slowly gaining the ability to do things differently, opening up the

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possibilities of intergenerational solidarity, turning enemies into allies and making progressive community a source of change. But it seems fitting to leave the final words to the two ‘original’ Cult TV shows, Star Trek and Doctor Who, who, even after fifty years and counting, are still regularly stepping into those imaginative borderlands. Michael Burnham, on the cusp of disaster, stares out at the cosmological marvel of binary stars to muse ‘A humbling reminder’, she says ‘that all life is born from chaos’ (1.1). However, the newly regenerated thirteenth incarnation of the Doctor offers the audience a more direct challenge. ‘We’re all capable of the most incredible change. We can evolve while still staying true to who we are. We can honour who we’ve been and choose who we want to be next. Now’s your chance. How about it?’ (11.1).

Notes Prelude 1

2

Given the long-running nature of the TV shows discussed, individual episodes will be numbered by season/series first, then the episode. Thus 11.1 refers to the first episode of the eleventh series of Doctor Who. ‘Woke’, initially from the United States, relates to awareness of social injustice such as racism, but in the UK it is often used as a another term for ‘political correctness’.

Chapter 1 1

The term comes from ‘relationship’ and is thought to derive from online fan discussions in the 1990s around the relationship of Mulder and Scully in The X-Files. Sometimes also called slash fiction, for example, a romantic relationship between Kirk/Spock from Star Trek.

References Prelude: The Thirteenth Doctor Bahr, R., 2018, ‘“Doctor Who” Season 11: TV Review’, The Hollywood Reporter, https:// www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/doctor-who-season-11-review-1150002 (Accessed 1 May 2019). Belam, M. & Martin, D., 2018, ‘“Too Touchy-feely”? Our Panel on Jodie Whittaker’s First Series of Doctor Who’, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/tv-andradio/2018/dec/10/too-touchy-feely-our-panel-on-jodie-whittakers-first-series-ofdoctor-who (Accessed 23 May 2019). BBC, 2017, ‘Introducing Jodie Whittaker – The Thirteenth Doctor’, https://www.bbc. co.uk/mediacentre/latestnews/2017/jodie-whittaker-13-doctor (Accessed 3 June 2019). BBC, 2018a, ‘BBC Complaints’, http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints/complaint/ DoctorWhoJodieWhittaker/ (Accessed, 31 May 2019). NB now removed from BBC site originally published 16. 7.18. BBC, 2018b, ‘Ray Holman – Costume Designer Q+A’, https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/ doctorwho/entries/3cfd7b93-2e89-4fec-a7b9-8de903f454f5 (Accessed 18 May 2019) Britton, P. & Barker, S., 2003, Reading between Designs: Visual Imagery and the Generation of Meaning in The Avengers, The Prisoner and Doctor Who, University of Texas Press, Austin. Chapman, J., 2002, Saints & Avengers: British Adventure Series of the 1960s, I.B. Tauris, London. Chapman, J., 2013, Inside the Tardis: The Worlds of Doctor Who, I.B. Tauris, London. Clarke, S., 2018, ‘Jodie Whittaker to Return as ‘Doctor Who’ in 2020 Amid Strong U.S. Ratings’, Variety, https://variety.com/2018/tv/news/doctor-who-jodie-whittakerreturn-2020-strong-us-ratings-1203085568/ (Accessed 28 May 2019). ‘Doctor Who Should Be Male’, 2019, [@MaleDoctorWho] 19 April, https://www. facebook.com/MaleDoctorWho/photos/a.811237395715916/1194256944080624/?ty pe=3&theater (Accessed 25 October 2019). Framke, C., 2018, ‘“Doctor Who”: The First Female Doctor Makes Her Mark’, Variety, https://variety.com/2018/tv/news/doctor-who-jodie-whittaker-premierereview-1202970694/ (Accessed 23 October 2019). Goldbart, M., 2018, ‘Doctor Who Enjoys Best Series Launch in 13 Years’, Broadcast, https://www-broadcastnow-co-uk.gcu.idm.oclc.org/ratings/doctor-who-enjoysbest-series-launch-in-13-years/5133351.article (Accessed 1 June 2019).

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Huckabee, J., [@hucksworld], 2017, ‘#DoctorWho Died Today’ [Twitter] 16 July, https:// twitter.com/hucksworld/status/886682969833865217 (Accessed 25 October 2019). Itzkoff, D., 2018, ‘Jodie Whittaker Brings “Doctor Who” Its Biggest Change in 55 Years’, New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/17/arts/television/jodiewhittaker-doctor-who.html (Accessed 22 October 2019). Martin, D., 2018, ‘Doctor Who Recap: Series 37, Episode One – The Woman Who Fell to Earth’, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2018/oct/07/ doctor-who-recap-series-37-episode-one-the-woman-who-fell-to-earth (Accessed 3 June 2019). Radio Times, 2018, ‘Jodie Whittaker Reveals the Story Behind Her Doctor Who Outfit’, https://www.radiotimes.com/news/tv/2018-10-19/jodie-whittaker-reveals-the-storybehind-her-doctor-who-outfit/ (Accessed 24 May 2019). ‘This Is Not My Doctor’, 2018, [u/smedster], 26 November, https://www.reddit.com/r/ doctorwho/comments/a0i200/this_is_not_my_doctor/ (Accessed 25 October 2019).

Chapter 1 The external environment: Business, technology and audiences Abbott, S., 2010, The Cult TV Book, I.B. Tauris, London. Archive of Our Own, n.d., https://archiveofourown.org (Accessed 25 June 2018). Bacon-Smith, C., 1992, Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia. Behrens, S., 1986, ‘Technological Convergence: Toward a United State of Media’, in Channels of Communication 1986 Field Guide 8–10. Booth, P. (ed.), 2018, A Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies, John Wiley & Sons Inc, Oxford. Casey, B., Casey, N., Calvert, B., French, L. & Lewis, J. (eds), 2008, Television Studies: The Key Concepts, Routledge, London. DiNucci, D., 1999, ‘Fragmented Future’, PRINT, 53(4), pp. 32, 221–2. Dunleavy, T., 2018, Complex Serial Drama and Multiplatform Television, Routledge, New York. Gray, J., Lee Harrington, C. & Sandvoss, C. (eds), 2017, Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, Second ed. New York University Press, New York. Gwenllian-Jones, Sara & Pearson, R., 2004, Cult Television, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. Jenkins, H., 2006, Convergence Culture, New York University Press, New York. Jenkins, H., 2013, Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture, Routledge, London. Jenkins, H. & Tulloch, J., 1995, Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Doctor Who and Star Trek, Routledge, London.

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Jenkins, H., Ford, S. & Green, J., 2013, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture, New York University Press, New York. Jenkins, H., Ito, M. & Boyd, D., 2016, Participatory Culture in a Networked Era : A Conversation on Youth, Learning, Commerce, and Politics, Polity Press, Cambridge. Jenner, M., 2018, Netflix and the Re-invention of Television, Palgrave Macmillan, UK. Johnson, C., 2005, Telefantasy, British Film Institute, London. Lavery, D., 2010, The Essential Cult TV Reader, The University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky. McLaughlin, B., 2018, ‘6 Stats Shaping the TV Business Today’, MIPCOM, https://mipblog. com/2018/05/6-april-tv-happenings-affect-2018-beyond/ (Accessed 7 June 2018). Reeves, J., Rodgers, M. & Epstein, M., 1996, ‘Rewriting Popularity: The Cult Files’, in D. Lavery, A. Hague, & M. Cartwright (eds), Deny All Knowledge: Reading The X-Files, Faber & Faber Ltd, London, pp. 22–35. Reeves, J., Rodgers, M. & Epstein, M., 2002, ‘The Sopranos as Brand Equity: The Art of Commerce in the Age of Digital Reproduction’, in D. Lavery (ed.), This Thing of Ours: Investigating the Sopranos, Wallflower Press, London, pp. 42–59.

The text: Genre, fantasy and liminal space Abrams, M.H., 1953, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition, Oxford University Press, Inc., Oxford. Altman, R., 1999, Film/Genre, British Film Institute, London. Bakhtin, M., 1973, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Ardis Publisher, New York. Baudry, J.L., 1974, ‘Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus’, Film Quarterly, 28(2), pp. 39–47. Branigan, E. & Buckland, W. (eds), 2015, The Routledge Encyclopedia of Film Theory, Routledge, New York. Brown, M. (ed.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 53–65. Buscombe, E., 1970, The Idea of Genre in the American Cinema, Screen, 11(2), pp. 33–45. Caraher, B., 2006, Genre Theory: Cultural and Historical Motives Engendering Literary Genre, in G. Dowd, J. Strong & L. Stevenson (eds), Genre Matters: Essays in Theory and Criticism, Intellect, Bristol, pp. 29–40. Duff, D., 2000, Modern Genre Theory, Pearson Education Limited, Harlow. Fiske, J., 2011, Television Culture, Second ed. Routledge, Abingdon. Frow, J., 2015, Genre, Routledge, Abingdon. Galt, R., 2011, Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image, Columbia University Press, New York. Gwenllian-Jones, S. & Pearson, R., 2004, ‘Introduction’, in Cult Television, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, pp. ix–xx. Hills, M., 2002, Fan Cultures, Routledge, London. Hume, K., 2014, Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality in Western Literature, Methuen, London and New York.

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Jackson, R., 1993, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, Routledge, London. Javitch, D., 2000, ‘The Assimilation of Aristotle’s Poetics in Sixteenth-century Italy’, in M Brown (ed), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 53–65. Jenkins, H., 2013/1992, Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture, Routledge, London. Lapsley, R. & Westlake, M., 2006, Film Theory: An Introduction, Manchester University Press, Manchester. Lewis, J. & Stempel, P., 1993, Cult TV: The Essential Critical Guide, Pavilion Books Ltd, London. Mathews, R., 2002, Fantasy: The Liberation of Imagination, Routledge, New York. Mendlesohn, F. & James, E., 2012, A Short History of Fantasy, Libri Publishing, Farringdon, Oxfordshire. Mittell, J., 2004, Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture, Routledge, London. Morris, P., 2003, Realism, Routledge, Oxon. Moss, M.E., 1990, Benedetto Croce: Essays on Literature and Literary Criticism, State University of New York Press, New York. Rosen, P. (ed.), 1986, Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, Columbia University Press, USA. Short, S., 2011, Cult Telefantasy Series, McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, Jefferson, USA.

The internal environment: Analytical psychology Attebery, B., 1992, Strategies of Fantasy, Indiana University Press, Bloomington. Berry, P., 1974, ‘An Approach to the Dream’, Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture, pp. 58–79. Bowring, M., 2004, ‘Resistance Is Not Futile: Liberating Captain Janeway from the Masculine-Feminine Dualism of Leadership’, Gender, Work and Organisation, 11(4), pp. 381–405. Campbell, Joseph, 2008/1949, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, New World Library, California. Cherry, B., 2016, Cult Media, Fandom, and Textiles: Handicrafting as Fan Art, Bloomsbury, London. Eco, U., 1985, ‘“Casablanca”: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage’, SubStance, 14(2), pp. 3–12. ffrench, P., 2015, ‘Tel Quel: Theory and Practice’, in M. Grishakova & S. Salupere (eds), Theoretical Schools and Circles in the Twentieth-Century Humanities, Routledge, London, pp. 99–114. Fowkes, K., 2010, The Fantasy Film, Wiley Blackwell, Chichester. Hanmer, R., 2014, ‘Xenasubtextalk’, Feminist Media Studies, 14(4), pp. 608–22. Houdebine, J., 1979, ‘Jung et Joyce’, Tel Quel, 81, pp. 63–5 quoted in Lernout, G., 1992, The French Joyce, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor.

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Index Abbott, Stacey 13, 19, 59 Abrams, M.H. 21, 22 active imagination 7, 33–4, 35, 42, 75, 89, 191 agency 6, 39–40, 64, 75, 99, 106, 151, 166, 168–9 Aguirre-Sacasa, Roberto 95, 98 Alba, Jessica 139, 149, 151 Allen, Amy 169 American Horror Story: Coven 70, 73, 75, 87, 90–5, 104 Cordelia Goode 74, 91, 93, 104 fandom 94–5 Fiona Goode 91, 93 Marie Laveau 91, 93 Myrtle Snow 93 setting 91–2 Zoe Benson 92–3, 94 amplification 35 analytical psychology 27. See also active imagination, amplification, archetypes, collective unconscious, ego, Jung, liminality, transcendent function, symbols Anderson, Gillian 58, 63–4 Andras, Emily 129, 130, 132 archetypes 17, 28, 29–30, 32, 38 Archie comics 95–6 Aristotle 15, 21, 22, 23 Arya Stark. See Game of Thrones audience 7, 12, 16, 19, 27, 33 autonomy 36–41, 57, 64, 74, 98, 104, 109, 146, 151, 155–8 Avengers, The 43, 44–51, 57, 64, 130 costume 46, 51 Cathy Gale 45 Emma Peel 46, 48–9, 65, 108 John Steed 46, 49 setting 47 Babylon 5 105, 139, 161 Delenn 161, 163, 164

Lyta Alexander 139–40 Susan Ivanova 105 Bassett, Angela 73, 91 Battlestar Galactica 105, 139, 162 Laura Roslin 162–3, 168 Starbuck 105 Bazin, Andre 24 Benson, Zoe. See American Horror Story: Coven Berman, Gail 121 Bewitched 68, 70, 74, 75–81 Endora 70, 74, 78, 80 fandom 80–1 Samantha Stephens 74, 76, 78–80 Serena 78 setting 77 Bionic Woman, The 112, 132, 141–8, 157 costume 142 fandom 147 Blackman, Honor 45, 46, 50 Brienne of Tarth. See Game of Thrones Brill, Ellen 91 Britton, Piers and Simon Barker 4, 25, 45, 47 Buffy the Vampire Slayer 68, 108, 121–9, 171, 191 Angel 122, 123, 128 Buffy Summers 106, 109, 121–9, 183, 192 costume 108 fandom 128 Spike 123–5 Willow Rosenberg 68, 126 Burge, Constance 82 Cameron, James 148, 151 Campbell, Joseph 28, 106 Carter, Chris 59, 63 Carter, Lynda 105, 111, 112, 114 Cathy Gale. See Avengers, The Cersei Lannister. See Game of Thrones Charmed 40, 68, 70, 73, 74, 80, 81, 82–90

Index fandom 89 Paige Halliwell 82, 84 Phoebe Halliwell 81, 82, 84, 89 Piper Halliwell 82, 84, 88 Prue Halliwell 82, 84 setting 87–8 Chibnall, Chris 2, 5 Chilling Adventures of Sabrina 70, 73, 95–103, 192 costume 96 fandom 103 Hilda Spellman 101, 103 Mary Wardwell/Lilith 101 Sabrina Spellman 73, 96 setting 96–8 Zelda Spellman 100–1 Chion, Michel 152, 158, 175 Chrisjen Avasarala. See Expanse, The cinematic excess 25 collective unconscious 29–30 consensual reality 33, 38, 41, 69, 106, 147, 160, 188, 191 Cordelia Goode. See American Horror Story: Coven Corey, James S. A. 163 costume 3, 39, 107, 117, 130, 142, 148, 155, 186. See also individual show titles crone 71, 72–3, 75, 165. See also old women Crosby, Sara 110, 125, 149, 151, 165 Cult TV 7, 10, 12, 26, 36, 41, 191 cyborg 139–41, 142, 163

211

Eglee, Charles H. 148 ego 29–30, 34 Eistenstein, Sergei 24 Elizabeth Weir. See Stargate Atlantis Emma Peel. See Avengers, The Endora. See Bewitched Expanse, The 163 Chrisjen Avasarala 163–4, 168 external environment 7, 10–14, 19, 26, 32, 128, 191 Falchuk, Brad 90 fandom 13, 16, 36. See also individual show titles fantasy 6, 8, 14, 20–3, 25–8, 31–4, 38, 41–2, 192 Farmiga, Taissa 92 Farscape 7, 105 femininity 41, 65, 74, 78, 83, 130, 136, 142, 169 feminism 6, 37, 39, 71–2, 75, 83 Film Noir 154, 177 Fiona Goode. See American Horror Story: Coven Fox Mulder. See X-Files, The Foucault, Michel 169 Fowkes, Katherine 28, 38 Freud, Sigmund 10, 27–8. See also psychoanalysis Friedan, Betty 75–6

Daenerys Targaryen. See Game of Thrones Dana Scully. See X-Files, The Dark Angel 148–53 costume 148–9 fandom 152–3 Max Guevara 148–53 voiceover 152 Davies, Russell T. 1, 2 Delenn. See Babylon 5 Diana Prince. See Wonder Woman Doctor Who 1–6, 51, 68, 105, 170, 188, 193 costume 3–5

Gabrielle. See Xena: Warrior Princess Game of Thrones 105, 161, 164–5 Arya Stark 105 Brienne of Tarth 105 Cersei Lannister 164–5 Daenerys Targaryen 164–5 Sansa Stark 165 Gardner, Gerald 71, 72, 74, 89, 98 Gellar, Sarah Michelle 107 gender 7, 36–7, 39, 60, 72, 156, 167 genre 14–20 girl power 83, 89 Gomez, Michelle 4, 73, 100 Gwenllian-Jones, Sara and Roberta Pearson 9, 18, 23, 27

Earp, Wynonna. See Wynonna Earp Eco, Umberto 16–17, 20, 22, 24, 27, 30, 170

Halliwell sisters. See Charmed Hammond, P.J. 51, 52 Hansen, Joanne 164

212 Haraway, Donna 140–1 Hilda Spellman. See Chilling Adventures of Sabrina Hills, Matt 18, 20, 24, 27, 170 Holman, Ray 3 Hume, Kathryn 21–2, 27, 32, 33, 47 hyperdiegesis 18, 20, 96, 170 Inness, Sherrie 106, 108, 116 interior monologue. See voiceover internal environment 7, 10, 14, 26–34 Ivanova, Susan. See Babylon 5 Jackson, Rosemary 20, 22, 27 Jaime Somers. See Bionic Woman, The Jenkins, Henry 11, 12, 17 Jessica Jones 73, 153–60 costume 155 setting 155 Trish Walker 158–9 Johnson, Catherine 13, 18–19 Jung, Carl G. 27–8. See also analytical psychology Kathryn Janeway. See Star Trek: Voyager Katrina Cornwell. See Star Trek: Discovery Kern, Brad 82 Kurtzman, Alex 180, 184 Lange, Jessica 73, 91 Laura Roslin. See Battlestar Galactica Lauter, Estella 41 Lavery, David 19 Lawless, Lucy 107, 115, 119 leadership 166–9, 188–9. See also autonomy, power assigned 167, 178 collective 167, 178 distributed 189 emergent 167, 184, 186 transactional 167, 178, 188 Lilith. See Chilling Adventures of Sabrina liminal (and liminality) 10, 22–3, 26, 28, 34, 36, 53, 140 L’Rell. See Star Trek: Discovery Lumley, Joanna 53, 57

Index Marie Laveau. See American Horror Story: Coven Martin-Green, Sonequa 181 Maslow, Abraham 39 Mathews, Richard 21 Max Guevara. See Dark Angel McCallum, David 53 menippea 20 Michael Burnham. See Star Trek: Discovery mimesis 21–2, 25, 33, 38. See also realism mise en scène 25–6, 39, 53, 78, 83, 87, 96–7, 113, 129, 131, 155. See also costume Montgomery, Elizabeth 75 Moorehead, Agnes 74 Mulgrew, Kate 176 Murphy, Ryan 90 Murray, Margaret 70–1 Myrtle Snow. See American Horror Story: Coven narrative 24–5 O’Riordan, Sean 53 Oakley, Ann 37 old women 73, 92–3, 165. See also crone Paige Halliwell. See Charmed patriarchy 39, 44, 60, 72, 106, 110, 136, 165, 169, 183 Paulson, Sarah 91 Penny Dreadful 68, 140 Lily Frankenstein 140 Vanessa Ives 68 Phoebe Halliwell. See Charmed Piper Halliwell. See Charmed Plato 15, 21 power 166, 168–9, 188. See also agency, autonomy Pratt, Annis 41, 109–10, 165, 183 Prue Halliwell. See Charmed psychoanalysis 17, 27, 29–30 realism 22–3. See also consensual reality Rigg, Diana 45, 50 Ritter, Krysten 139, 153

Index Roddenberry, Gene 171, 172 Rosenberg, Melissa 153 Sabrina Spellman. See Chilling Adventures of Sabrina Samantha Carter. See Stargate Atlantis Samantha Stephens. See Bewitched Sansa Stark. See Game of Thrones Sapphire & Steel 43, 51–8 costume 53 Sapphire 54, 55–7, 65 setting 53–4 Steel 53 satanism 98–9 Scrofano, Melanie 106, 135 Serena. See Bewitched Serial Queens 27–8 Shipka, Kiernan 73, 96 Short, Sue 19 Soper, Lisa 97 Star Trek franchise 169 Star Trek: Discovery 180–8, 193 Ash/Voq 183, 185 costume 182, 186 fandom 188 Katrina Cornwell 183, 185, 186 L’Rell 184 Michael Burnham 181–6 Philippa Georgiou 181 Sylvia Tilly 186–8 Star Trek: The Next Generation 105, 172, 177 Beverley Crusher 172 Deanna Troi 172 Elizabeth Shelby 172 Jean Luc Picard 176, 177 Tasha Yar 173 Star Trek: The Original Series 170, 172 180 James T. Kirk 170 Janice Lester 172 Number One 172, 182 Star Trek: Voyager 139, 171–9 costume/Hairgate 176 Kathryn Janeway 35, 171–9, 184, 186 Seven of Nine 35, 178 Starbuck. See Battlestar Galactica Stargate Atlantis 161 Elizabeth Weir 161–2 Samantha Carter 162

213

Steed, John. See Avengers, The Supernatural 68, 153 Sylvia Tilly. See Star Trek: Discovery symbols 31–3, 34, 36 toughness 106–8, 110, 168, 188 transcendent function 7, 31–5, 44, 64, 140, 160, 191 Trish Walker. See Jessica Jones unconscious 22, 28–9, 31, 38, 41, 166. See also collective unconscious voiceover 128, 152, 154, 157, 175, 181 Wagner, Lindsay 139, 142 Wardwell, Mary. See Chilling Adventures of Sabrina Waverly Earp. See Wynonna Earp Westworld 139, 180 Whedon, Joss 121, 127, 128 Whittaker, Jodie 2 Wicca 72, 104 witchcraft 67, 69–72, 74–5 Wollen, Peter 24 Wonder Woman 109, 111–15 costume 107 Diana Prince 105, 107, 108 Worthington, Mark 91–2 Wright, Brad 162 Wynonna Earp 68, 107, 108, 129–36, 181 costume 108, 131, 134 Doc Holliday 134 fandom 129 Waverly Earp 131–2 Xena: Warrior Princess 107, 109, 115–21 costume 117 fandom 118, 120 Gabrielle 115, 117, 118–19 X-Files, The 43, 58–65 Dana Scully 60–2, 65, 162 fandom 59–60 Fox Mulder 60 setting 59 Zelda Spellman. See Chilling Adventures of Sabrina