World Museum, Liverpool, UK Until 30 October
IF YOU know one thing about Doctor Who, it may be that the TARDIS, the titular Doctor’s spaceship, is based on a physical impossibility: it is “bigger on the inside”. Externally, it looks like a small, blue telephone box, but those who enter find themselves in a multi-dimensional labyrinth.
While such a premise might seem fantastical, in fact, many of the ideas from the nearly 60-year-old show – the longest-running sci-fi series in the world – have been drawn from science, from the TARDIS’s ability to travel through space and time, to the Doctor’s capacity to regenerate and all the weird and wonderful alien life forms across the cosmos.
Exploring how science has influenced the cult TV series is the premise behind a new exhibition at the World Museum in Liverpool, UK. It is a fun and mind-expanding experience, teaching visitors about science and technology alongside some of the strange props, costumes and characters from the show.
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The exhibition is cleverly designed so that as you walk around, you almost feel you could be in the TARDIS, or perhaps somehow trapped within an episode of the TV series. You enter through a simulacrum of the TARDIS’s famous blue doors and are confronted with the spaceship’s hexagonal control panel, albeit a simplified version of it, as it is a replica of the one from Doctor Who‘s first series, made in 1963. Your journey continues through rooms with dim lighting, unexpected turns and sometimes monsters around a corner.
It is a thrill to meet the original Face of Boe, an immensely aged being who has ended up as a huge, disembodied head, living in a jar and communicating telepathically. Next to him is Lady Cassandra, a human from 5 billion years in the future, who is so vain and has had so much cosmetic surgery she is now just a face embedded in a single layer of skin stretched taut in a frame.
Characters such as these allow the exhibition to explore ideas about lifespan extension, including potential anti-ageing treatments, like immune system manipulation and removal of worn-out cells from our bodies. It also explores some of the practical and ethical issues we will face if we succeed in lengthening our lifespans. Now Lady Cassandra has been reduced to little more than a “bitchy trampoline”, she has lost sight of all that once made her human, says Steven Swaby, the exhibition’s creator.
There are old friends and enemies as well as new. You can turn yourself into a Dalek by climbing inside one of their casements and waggling their notorious “sink plunger” arms. You also learn how the Daleks’ famous harsh voices are created – and you can try it out on your own voice.
The presence of K9, the Doctor’s old robot dog, as well as several incarnations of the Cybermen and other android-like creatures, allows the exhibition to explore our ambivalent relationship with robots. Anyone who dismisses the potential dangers of AI must never have watched the , represented here by one of their Emojibot killers. In this storyline, swarms of intelligent nanobots created to keep humankind happy end up murdering people who display visible unhappiness.
The nanobots, called the Vardy, were named after Canadian scientist Andrew Vardy, who studies swarm robotics and biologically inspired robots. The exhibition doesn’t reveal how Vardy feels about this honour.
Another of the Doctor’s most famous features is their ability to regenerate. When the show’s producers decided to introduce Jodie Whittaker as the first female Doctor in 2017, it caused controversy among some fans. But as the exhibition explains, some real-life animal species, such as clownfish, display such sequential hermaphroditism, the ability for one individual to change sex within their lifetime.
If I have one complaint, it is that, at times, I would have enjoyed more in-depth explanations of some of the scientific ideas; this exhibition leans more towards entertainment than education. On the train home, I found myself rereading an old 91av article on treatments targeting worn-out cells to remind myself of the details.
If the exhibition’s aim is to inspire people to learn more about science, then it worked on me.
