“Cat People. Putting out the fire.”

Doctor Who fandom has long done easy jokes about the final serial of the final twentieth century series of Doctor Who being called Survival. But the essential irony of this story being last would still be there if the serial had been called something else. Even if it had been transmitted using the placeholder title under which it was commissioned, “Cat-Flap”, which even at the time, the series’ script editor Andrew Cartmel and the serial’s author Rona Munro knew would inevitably be mined for smutty innuendo.¹

Because “survival” is the serial’s topic, as well as its title. It’s the second of diptych in that season both dealing in different ways with Darwinian theory. Or in Survival’s case with popular, vulgar misreadings of it, often applied outside the field of natural selection, and used to justify human behaviour. Survival nails its colours to the mast early on, with the Doctor describing the dictum “survival of fittest” as “… a glib generalisation, bound to be misinterpreted” in Part One.