1. Introduction
[1.1] In March and April 2020, Jodie Whittaker, known for playing the Thirteenth Doctor in the BBC's Doctor Who, appeared in three videos promoting Covid-19 awareness. In these videos, she appears in character, speaking as the Doctor. This research comprises a close textual analysis of these videos and a reception analysis of the comments posted to them. These analyses reveal that the videos' use of fantasy to directly comment on and in many ways try to affect reality enabled many fans to engage with the videos as "public engagement keystones," which Ashley Hinck (2012) defines as orienting, anchoring mechanisms that help people make sense of the world around them and that include their fandom affiliations.
[1.2] Fans frequently evoked the language of Doctor Who in their comments, demonstrating how the videos and the wider story world of Doctor Who can function as keystones for public engagement. For example, one commenter compared the virus to the Weeping Angels (a villainous alien species in Doctor Who), a comparison which allowed the fan to frame Covid-19 in familiar terms. However, the idea of public engagement keystones needs to be modified to include the specificity of the world-encompassing anxiety generated by a global pandemic. How can we move from public engagement keystones to pandemic engagement keystones?
[1.3] Although public engagement keystones can take a variety of forms, I hypothesize that keystones involving a utopian fantastical element (in comparison to dystopian) may have been particularly effective in producing engagement with the pandemic because of the genre's hopeful outlook (Worley 2005). This video essay explores how these videos and many fans deployed the often-optimistic fantasy world of Doctor Who to make meaning out of Covid-19. In doing so, this video essay helps generate a better understanding of how fantasy-based media products may function for fans as keystones for engaging with a global health crisis, be it Covid-19 or a future pandemic.