“The Scrapyard at the End of the Universe”: Waste Spaces as Incubators for Uncanny AI in the Doctor Who Episode “The Doctor’s Wife”

Abstract

Human society effectively others and marginalizes its waste spaces. This designation as a willingly forgotten, alternate place has inspired sci-fi (screen) writers to (re-)present dumps as sites of subversion in the otherwise ordered fabrics of their secondary worlds. One facet of this othering are the presentations of these spaces as incubators for new, often dangerous, posthuman forms of life. In the Doctor Who episode “The Doctor’s Wife” (2011), a waste space gave rise to artificial intelligence, which came into being without direct human intervention, thus subverting any creator’s myths humanity might cling to, but it also created itself out of the (technological and organic) material of the dumps, giving what human society deemed waste a new purpose. The totality in which this AI rethinks the potential value of the waste material accessible to it is radical, uncanny and challenging to human sensibilities, especially as regards humanity’s relationship to natural/technical resources.