Recently I stumbled across some old episodes of the TV show “Who Do You Think You Are?” Here in the US, the show has been running for eight seasons; the UK original is going on thirteen. Among the celebrities who have traced their roots on the UK version are David Tennant and several other actors associated with the program in one way or another (e.g., John Hurt, Mark Gatiss).

When I got to the US episode on actress Ashley Judd, I was startled to discover that she and I share a 10-great grandfather (making us 11th cousins). That triggered my genealogy bug again, and for the last few days I’ve been poking around to see if there are any new records to be found online since last I looked.

This was all in the back of my head, then, when I sat down to think about what to blog about next. Was there a way to bring genealogy into a discussion of the Whoniverse (spoiler: there’s always a way)? Having discarded ideas about discussing characters like Kate Stewart (daughter of Brigadier Alastair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart) or our favorite UNIT scientist Osgood (some relation to the UNIT sergeant of the same surname?), I decided to focus on the Doctor himself.

Enter looming. For those of you who may not have read (or possibly even heard of) the Virgin New Adventures (NA) series of novels, these books continued the Seventh Doctor’s story after the final televised adventure Survival. Two of these novels (Cat’s Cradle: Time’s Crucible and Lungbarrow) included revelations about Time Lord history and how their biology was altered so that they could not reproduce sexually. Instead, new Time Lords are “loomed,” or reproduced on special bio-engineering machines from extant genetic material, and “born” as adults.

No matter what else brings fans to Who, the Doctor (in his many incarnations) and his Companions are the backbone—the major components that keep us coming back. While not every character or actor is every fan’s cup of tea, some seem to be ones we (or at least the production team) can’t get enough of. They appear multiple times, either within the same story (doppelgängers) or at some later date (suspiciously familiar), more often than not without explanation.

Doppelgängers are a familiar concept in the modern era, even discounting Clara’s split-across-time personae. The Zygons alone are responsible for an unseemly number of them. Perhaps most famously, the Osgoods—one human, one Zygon (and eventually another Zygon)—appeared side by side, working to maintain a tenuous peace. Of course, any time the Zygons crop up, they keep the audience guessing about which individual is the original and which the doppelgänger. It’s good mental exercise.

Similarly, we’ve seen the Flesh. Not specifically sentient by itself, the Flesh was a more technological take on Zygon bio-duplication. (And now I’m wondering if it didn’t start as a script work-around before usage rights for the Zygons could be secured…) Before we saw the larger-arc implications of the Flesh, though, we got full-on doppelgänger action with the Eleventh Doctor and his Ganger (the term for a Flesh duplicate directly referencing the German root word).

Despite the common claim that Doctor Who can “do anything” because of its premise—the setting could be anywhere in the universe, at any time in its past or future—the show is also well known to do much the same thing over and over again, for various reasons. These plot, set, and character ideas have appeared so often that they’ve become tropes. And I love me a well-executed trope.

For example, a tried and true way to save money on a show that often suffers from its imagination being larger than its budget is either to set a story in a single location or to set several stories in a filming block in the same location. If the production team can simply re-dress the set and shoot from a different angle to make it look just different enough, the audience (aside from a certain subset of nerds who look for that stuff) won’t even notice.

In the pre-Hiatus/Classic era, this trick was so frequently used as to become almost a joke. Viewers all knew that an alien planet would be set in a quarry (very often the same one), and that interior scenes of the Doctor and his Companion(s) getting chased through a ship’s interior or alien citadel would go past the exact same, re-dressed chunk of corridor a dozen times. (In fact, this trope is so well known it became part of the title of a 2010 commentary book.)

Last week was rough. The big thunderstorm that rolled through town on Tuesday was excitement enough, what with trees and branches downed everywhere and power out for as much as a couple days for some folks. But then Wednesday night the epidemic of police violence against Black citizens hit close to home.

Less than five miles from my home, on a stretch of road I’ve driven countless times myself, a Black couple and child were pulled over nominally due to a broken taillight. The man, whose name was Philando Castile, did not leave the scene alive.

Aside from this particular tragedy happening in my neck of the woods, Philando’s death affected one of my micro-communities directly. You see Philando—or “Mr. Phil,” as he was known to the kids—worked at my daughters’ school.

So why am I bringing it up here, of all places? There are several reasons. First and foremost, it’s what’s been on my mind. And though I don’t get a lot of traffic on the blog, especially since I changed my weekly posting schedule, this is where I have the largest platform. As a white person—a white American, specifically—I feel like I have to stop hiding behind my desire not to invite conflict (good God, I hate facing personal conflict) and speak up when and where I can.