The first question of many: why the philosophy of Doctor Who?
The parallels between philosophy and Doctor Who are legion. Like philosophical reflection, the Doctor’s adventures are full of surprises; they develop through various twists and turns that could not have been predicted from the outset. The Doctor embraces mysteries of time and space; he fights ignorance and evil, and strives, in a complex universe, towards truth and the good.
More importantly, philosophy (the Greek roots of the word mean ‘love of wisdom’) and Doctor Who share a common origin: the experience of wonder. ‘For this is an experience which is characteristic of a philosopher, this wondering: this is where philosophy begins and nowhere else’, claims Plato’s Socrates.1 Aristotle, Plato’s pupil, concurs: ‘For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophise.’2 Hundreds of years before philosophy was kick-started in ancient Greece, Lao Tzu shared this wisdom: ‘From wonder into wonder existence opens.’3 Doctor Who has, from its very beginning, embraced this sense of wonder at every turn: fast-forward to 1963, when Coal Hill School science teacher Ian Chesterton steps into a battered police call box that is far bigger on the inside than it seems from the outside. ‘Let me get this straight,’ Ian intones, no doubt fighting off a certain intellectual dizziness. ‘A thing that looks like a police box, standing in a junkyard … it can move anywhere in time and space?’ ‘Quite so,’ chuckles the nameless Doctor, owner of the remarkable machine.
Fifty years later, the thing that looks like a police box still moves anywhere, its owner’s guests still wonder how it can be bigger on the inside, and the question posed by the show’s title is still a live one: ‘Doctor Who?’ The ethics and worldview of the Doctor, who is nearly immortal and the last of his kind, continue to evolve. So also has the philosophy that underlies this BBC production that has worn many hats since 1963: science fiction, fantasy, Gothic horror, weird comedy, tragedy. This book’s explanation for the longevity of the longest-running science fantasy show in television history is that the whole interpretive approach of Doctor Who has changed faces more often than the Doctor himself.
At the beginning of his tenure as the 11th version of our favourite Time Lord, Matt Smith invited us to join him to see ‘all of time and space, everything that ever happened or ever will. One question: where do you want to start?’4 The Doctor’s own story, on the other hand, begins with very little for us to go on:
In the beginning, the Doctor was a mystery, an enigma. The title of the series – Doctor Who? – was a valid and very real question. We now know that he is a Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey who can change his form when he ‘dies’. But this tells us very little about him.5
The creator of the character of the Doctor, as well as of details about the Doctor’s first companions and his time machine, ‘the ship’, or TARDIS, was C.E. ‘Bunny’ Webber, of the BBC’s Script Department. Three other individuals played a crucial role in the origins of the Doctor Who phenomenon: Sydney Newman (BBC Head of Drama), David Whitaker (the show’s first story editor) and Verity Lambert (first producer). Whitaker was concerned that the episodes of Doctor Who should be action-packed and not too cerebral, and novice producer Lambert was keenly interested in doing something that the BBC had never done before. The philosophies of Whitaker and Lambert underwrote the BBC’s new strategy of iconoclasm in the face of its incipient competitor, ITV, launched in 1955.6 Newman’s focus was to capitalise on an accessible time-travel premise ‘exploring scientific and historical themes […] which could be described as educational, or at least mind-opening, for the children watching’.7
Yet, contrary to the view that the new time-travel adventure programme was aimed specifically at children, Newman claimed, ‘I wanted to bridge the gap on a Saturday between the afternoon’s sports coverage, which attracted a huge adult audience, and Juke Box Jury, which had a very large teenage following. Doctor Who was never intended to be simply a children’s programme, but something that would appeal to people who were in a rather childlike frame of mind.’8 The label of ‘children’s adventure show’ had less to do with the BBC’s direction than with popular prejudices against ‘pulp’ science fiction (SF), particularly the space opera form that made use of mad emperors, spaceships and battles between the stars. Show chronicler Peter Haining writes:
The main body of audiences in the Sixties were adults who tended to regard TV SF as either children’s fare, or as trash: an unfounded prejudice probably stemming from unwarranted comparisons with the comic-strip science fiction movie serials of the 1930s and 40s, or with the UK-banned “horror” comics of the 1950s.9
In many ways, Doctor Who was created to be an ‘anti-space opera’. The puzzling, misanthropic, elderly Doctor is an anti-hero and anti-authoritarian to boot. His fundamental interest is in travelling – not avenging wrongs – and when he does get involved in fighting evil, the weapons he uses are his wits.
That having been said, the technical advances that made early Doctor Who possible can be found in other ground-breaking British ‘thriller’ sci-fi vehicles: H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1949), a film based on what is arguably the best-known sci-fi novel and the world’s first television science fiction production; the Quatermass serials (1953, 1955, 1958); and Sydney Newman’s children’s serials Pathfinders in Space (1959), Pathfinders to Mars (1960) and Pathfinders to Venus (1961). Like early Doctor Who, these programmes emphasised Newman’s dictate to ‘tackl[e] problems realistically with a strict observance of scientific laws’.10 This worldview, suggesting that science and rational thinking could provide the solutions to the central dilemmas of the Doctor’s world – and indeed, those of our own as well – is the essence of philosophical ‘positivism’, which largely dictated the ethical perspective of Doctor Who as well as other prominent television scifi shows of the 1960s like Lost in Space, Gerry Anderson’s ‘Supermarionation’ programmes, and Star Trek. Yet, as we shall see in Chapter 1, Doctor Who’s positivism is tempered by other philosophical elements. In modern SF, the positivistic attitude generated plots that revolved around the theme of accepting modernism and the consequences of our increasing dependence upon technology:
Science challenged man to rid himself of his illusions and face the true facts of existence […] as science saw them. The soul of man was stripped away by science and discarded, and with it all of man’s accustomed sense of worth and purpose. In its place, science offered man a new identity. Henceforth he was to be an orphan child in a universe vastly beyond his comprehension.11
This positivist outlook (called in written SF ‘hard sci-fi’) also supported Sydney Newman’s desire to avoid preying on viewers’ primal fears by featuring ‘Bug-Eyed Monsters’ on the new programme; one innovation of 1960s science fiction was the plot twist in which we are introduced to initially frightening alien beings, which are ‘humanised’ later in the story, usually through the rational inquiry of the protagonists.
The original crew of characters on board the TARDIS supports this mission well. Ian Chesterton (William Russell), a science teacher, is our guide to the right questions to ask about the future-oriented episodes. Barbara Wright (Jacqueline Hill), his fellow Coal Hill School teacher, relies on her historical knowledge to orient us when the TARDIS arrives in the past. Susan Foreman (Carole Ann Ford) is the ‘unearthly child’ who is the object of their interest since, as the original Writer’s Guide to the series claims, she ‘has a wide general knowledge and on some subjects she can be brilliantly factual. On others, she is lamentably ignorant.’12 Susan is the ultimate ‘insider’, designed to attract the show’s young core audience; her grandfather, simply ‘The Doctor’ (William Hartnell) or ‘Doctor Who’ as the Writer’s Guide names him, ‘has escaped from the Fiftieth Century’ out of disillusionment with the lifestyle of that time. With strong intimations of his alien nature carried in his crotchety behaviour, he is the ultimate ‘outsider’. The Doctor’s alterity, his ‘alienness’ – quite different to Susan’s – is eventually softened over the course of the first year’s series. But the relationship between the Doctor and the TARDIS is the key MacGuffin that drives the series from episode to episode: ‘insofar as his operation of the “ship” is concerned he is much like the average driver of a motor car in that he is its master when it works properly and its bewildered slave when it is temperamental’.13
Joined by a parade of fellow travellers scooped from past (the Trojan War), present (the club scene in 1960s London) and future (a space pilot marooned on the planet Mechanus, the natives of which are – wait for it – giant, mobile fungi), the Doctor careened through time and space, forging vaguely paternal relationships with his younger companions in weekly adventures that spanned, at least at first, the entire year. Doctor Who was neither the only nor the first BBC programme to use the approximately 25-minute episodic format, with story arc serials usually spanning from four to six episodes, yet it has become identified with the thrilling cliff-hangers that end each episode, and with a distinctive musical ‘sting’ and fadeout at the moment of imminent peril. From 1963 to 1966, the Doctor survived encounters with the Daleks, villainous Voords and bloodthirsty French revolutionaries, escaped from the ‘security kitchen’ of the monocular Monoids, and defeated a fellow time traveller in the year 1066. He ultimately met his fate after a harrowing encounter with the half-human, half-machine Cybermen.
But the Doctor doesn’t die. Together with the time- and space-spanning TARDIS, the Doctor’s surprising ability to regenerate – to change his physical form and personality while maintaining his identity and memories – is another distinctive hallmark of the programme. Although it is common to see different actors playing the same role (James Bond and too many soap opera characters come quickly to mind) no other television or movie series has featured the serial replacement of the protagonist as an integral part of the unfolding storyline. The programme’s third producer, Innes Lloyd, developed the idea as a way to continue production of Doctor Who in the face of Hartnell’s flagging health. In 1966, Patrick Troughton debuted as his replacement, and ratings immediately spiked upwards. Although Hartnell was himself less than enthusiastic about leaving the role he had originated, he had recommended Troughton highly.14 Yet the appearance of a new face in the TARDIS control room left many viewers uneasy, a feeling echoed by companion Ben Jackson (Michael Craze), who finds on the ground the ruby ring that ‘his’ Doctor always wore. ‘Now, look, the Doctor always wore this. So if you’re him, then it should fit, now shouldn’t it?’ Ben accuses the curious, mop-haired fellow as ‘the new Doctor’ rises from the floor (‘The Power of the Daleks’, 1966).
Another new beginning for Doctor Who in 1966 was the concentrated effort to beef up the action-oriented elements of the programme. For the next decade, the show would appear less like a filmed stage production, taking greater advantage of location filming and more elaborate sets. Innes Lloyd and his story editor Gerry Davis (co-creator, with Kit Pedler, of the Cybermen) were keen to have the Doctor more physically involved in the adventures. The differences between the old and new Doctor are particularly obvious in two of Troughton’s first few stories, ‘The Highlanders’ (1966–7) and ‘The Underwater Menace’ (1967). In both serials, the Doctor relishes the use of disguises, play-acting and accents in his quests to set things right. Whereas Hartnell’s Doctor maintained an air of command and had exhibited a tempered respect for other authorities, Troughton’s depiction was gleefully anti-authoritarian in tapping into the pulse of late 1960s youth culture. This often manifested itself in quips about how rational order always breaks down: ‘Logic merely allows one to be wrong with authority,’ he observes in spurning the efforts of the Brotherhood of Logicians to raise the Cybermen from their frozen tombs on the planet Telos.
During three years of running through corridors, Troughton’s era of Doctor Who brought back the Cybermen four times and the Daleks twice. There was still plenty of room for new monsters that would quickly become iconic, the test being whether younger viewers were only able to watch them from the safety of behind the couch. The Ice Warriors, the Yeti, Macra, Chameleons, Quarks, Krotons and a carnivorous North Sea seaweed all menaced the Doctor and his Scots highlander companion Jamie MacCrimmon (Frazer Hines). Troughton’s era mastered and refined the ‘base under siege’ motif of many future episodes, and during this period of relative innocence, there was no doubt in the viewer’s mind that the show’s monsters were the villains. The Doctor is surely right to claim, as he does in the face of a Cyberman invasion of Earth’s moon, that, ‘There are some corners of the universe which have bred the most terrible things. Things which act against everything we believe in. They must be fought!’ (‘The Moonbase’, 1967). But precisely what is the nature of their evil, and what justifies the Doctor’s interference in the ‘web of time’ to stop them? In the wake of the Troughton era, the Doctor’s own motivations would sometimes become suspect to allies and companions, leading some to conclude that he is the monster.
The question of the Doctor’s attitude towards evil would be further complicated in 1970 by another of the show’s major transitions. For its seventh series, Doctor Who was moving to colour broadcasting and, with it, a flamboyant new Doctor (Jon Pertwee) was cast. Winning the role in part because his imposing height and mop of grey-white hair contrasted strongly with Troughton’s appearance, the ‘new new Doctor’ emerged from the TARDIS after having been forcibly regenerated by his own people, the Time Lords of Gallifrey (‘Spearhead from Space’, 1970). Deliberately cast against type as a former radio and television funnyman, Pertwee found the role of the Doctor to be the first time he was able to emerge from underneath the actor’s ‘green umbrella’ of ‘character parts and eccentrics’. ‘So eventually I just decided to play him as I felt,’ he explained in an interview for the Jon Pertwee Fan Club Newsletter, 1975, ‘so really what the Doctor liked was just an extension of what I like’.15
The narrative base that was to dominate the five years of Pertwee’s time in the TARDIS was the Doctor’s exile on Earth – his punishment for breaking Gallifrey’s cardinal law of non-interference in the affairs of other times and worlds. Through adventures involving menaces both alien (the Axon energy vampires, the mannequin-like Autons) and home grown (the Silurians, intelligent reptilian predecessors to humankind on Earth), this acerbic, anti-authoritarian, often hedonistic Doctor was frequently accompanied by a military straight man, Brigadier Alastair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart (Nicholas Courtney). ‘The Brigadier’ proved to be the Doctor’s longest-standing friend, entering the show’s canon through Courtney’s repeated efforts in working with nearly all the actors portraying the Doctor, at least before his death in 2011. After the 1973 serial ‘The Three Doctors’, which served as a tenth-anniversary celebration reuniting the first three actors to play the role of the Doctor, it also became canonical to refer to individual incarnations of the Time Lord as ‘the first Doctor’ (Hartnell), ‘the second Doctor’ (Troughton), etc.16
Although Hartnell’s and Troughton’s Doctors had aligned themselves with the best and brightest of humanity in order to fight evil, the era of the third Doctor was more explicitly moralistic than theirs, engaging with real-life threats to the quality of life on Earth. The most pointed of its serials was ‘The Green Death’ (1973), which warned against ecological disaster. Pertwee-era producer Barry Letts shares:
The Green Death came about after [script editor] Terrance Dicks and I had read a series of pieces in an environmental magazine, The Ecologist, about the pollution of the Earth by man. The articles were very disturbing and made me wish I could do something positive about it.17
The Pertwee era as a whole was also distinguished by the strained relationships between a particular troika of players – the Doctor, incessantly working to revive the TARDIS at all costs to resume his life of wandering; the Brigadier and his division of the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce (UNIT), protecting Great Britain from alien invasions by shooting first and asking questions afterwards; and the Doctor’s jailers, the Time Lords. Both sets of relationships are complicated by the recurring interference of the Doctor’s nemesis, the suave and hypnotic Master (Roger Delgado). The Master understands his fellow Time Lord’s frustrations with humanity, yet holds the Doctor’s self-righteous morality in contempt. By the third Doctor’s final series of adventures in 1974, the insults and resentment that he hurls at the Brigadier have softened into trust and respect. Before this, the Time Lords had revoked his exile (in the aforementioned ‘The Three Doctors’), and his attitude towards his own hyper-futuristic society is ‘more commonly presented as one of allegiance and loyalty’.18
But all this was to fall apart again with the Doctor’s third regeneration after an encounter with giant spiders and radioactive crystals on the planet Metebelis III. The fourth Doctor, played by Tom Baker, has enjoyed the most protracted of the Doctor’s lives so far (if we factor in both the time served as the Doctor and the number of episodes starring him). Over seven years, Baker fleshed out the character as a ‘Bohemian eccentric’, with his trailing, multicoloured scarf becoming one of the enduring icons of the programme. But Baker’s characterisation changed drastically, depending upon the direction taken by the producers during his term. This ranged from moody and prone to soliloquies (Philip Hinchcliffe, 1974–7); to over-the-top comedy and ad-libbing witticisms (Graham Williams, 1977–9); to restrainedly mordant (John Nathan-Turner, 1980–1).
The fourth Doctor shares little of his predecessor’s loyalty to Earth, Britain and UNIT, and resumes his peripatetic career among the stars. Baker’s era showcases one of the programme’s more fruitful periods of experimentation, integrating wider themes from SF in general as well as playing to its own history. For example, the Doctor’s first televised visit to his home planet of Gallifrey occurs in ‘The Deadly Assassin’, a 1976 Manchurian Candidate-style political thriller that reveals the vaunted Time Lords as both decadent and eminently corruptible.19 Many of Baker’s serials in the later 1970s reflect the show’s evolving social conscience: no matter what planet he visits, the Doctor quickly assumes a position helping workers, the poor or socially marginalised to work towards reform or, in some cases, revolution. With regard to the show’s format, these years also delivered outrageous scenarios from the mind of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’s Douglas Adams, as well as a full year’s story arc in 1978–9 with the quest of the Doctor and companions K-9 and Romanadvoratrelundar for the fabled ‘Key to Time’. Christopher H. Bidmead, story editor after Adams, gave us mind-bending premises such as the ‘Zero Point’ between universes, a megalomaniacal cactus taking its revenge on a world of primarily deciduous forests, and the unravelling of the mathematical structure of the universe itself.
This final year of the fourth Doctor’s adventures (1980–1) promised a more substantial transmogrification of the programme than had occurred with the transition to colour and the Doctor’s exile on Earth. Throughout the 1980s, producer John Nathan-Turner helmed Doctor Who and initiated a distinctive second phase in the show’s development. In hindsight, this decade would represent a harbinger of the show’s feel when it returned in 2005 after cancellation for 16 years. The 1980s were characterised by a new, shiny TARDIS prop as part of a new, shiny look designed to compete in the Star Wars sci-fi market. They featured more frequent story arcs, and, most importantly, dramatically increased producer’s control over the direction and marketing of the show. One thing that Nathan-Turner changed immediately was the way our protagonist was played, since he ‘had never been particularly enamoured of Baker’s portrayal of the Doctor, considering that his increasingly assured and flippant interpretation made the character seem too dominant and invulnerable, detracting from the series’ dramatic potential’.20
Increasing the risks and making the Doctor more vulnerable was precisely what Nathan-Turner was about, whether this meant getting rid of his problem-solving K-9 computer, destroying his sonic screwdriver, or reintroducing his arch-enemy, the Master (now played by Anthony Ainley). This strategy was reflected nowhere more clearly than in the choice of Baker’s replacement in the youngest actor to have played the role yet, Peter Davison. Davison was cast against Baker’s over-the-top portrayal. Now the Doctor was perceived as ‘a rather slight, fair-haired young man with a pleasant, open face’.21 Episodes were often fleshed out by squabbles between this old Doctor with a young body and his argumentative companions, like young mathematical genius Adric or Australian flight stewardess Tegan Jovanka.
The Davison era took a more serious look at itself – including the tragic death of TARDIS traveller, Adric (Matthew Waterhouse), whom the Doctor claimed it was impossible to save, even with a time machine. It also began to reopen certain ethical questions – seemingly shelved since the Hartnell era – about the desirability of interfering with established history. 1982’s ‘Black Orchid’, the first purely historical story since 1966–7’s ‘The Highlanders’, was a showcase for Davison’s cricket-geared Doctor to play the game among the upper crust of the 1920s. In another episode, the TARDIS is used against its owner when it is revealed that the Doctor’s companions will age to death if he attempts to escape. These escapades were capped by a television event in 1983, near the end of Davison’s three-year tenure, when time turned back on itself four times over for a 90-minute special commissioned for the twentieth anniversary of Doctor Who. Like the tenth anniversary programme, this entry, ‘The Five Doctors’, emphasised the ability of Time Lords to take advantage of the special properties of time and allowed four incarnations – played by Davison, Pertwee, Troughton and Richard Hurndall (a stand-in for the late Hartnell) – to meet.
The deepening contrasts between appearances and personalities of the various Doctors in the 1980s may have been an effort by Nathan-Turner to recapture the 1960s and 70s phenomenon of audience identification with a particular actor, now called ‘my first Doctor’. Criticisms of the Doctor’s frailties, as well as worries about the level of violent themes in Doctor Who, were also amplified. In his première appearance, the sixth Doctor (Colin Baker) comments on his predecessor in a denigrating manner, almost as if he is speaking of another person. ‘My previous self had a kind of feckless charm that simply wasn’t me!’ he blusters (‘The Twin Dilemma’, 1984). He proceeds, in a post-regenerative fit, to try to strangle companion Perpugilliam Brown (Nicola Bryant), then gives her over to alien kidnappers to try to save his own skin. While this instability of character is overcome within his first episodes, Baker’s Doctor continued to be ‘a highly volatile and unpredictable character. Theatrical, pretentious, arrogant, rude, impatient, irascible; all these adjectives could be reasonably used to describe typical aspects of his behaviour.’22 Based on viewer outcry, this attempt by Baker to recapture some of the alien grumpiness that Hartnell had pioneered was significantly toned down in his second series of stories. Ultimately, discontent with his performance and with the whole tenor of mid-1980s Who left Colin Baker as the only actor who played the Doctor to be sacked by the BBC.
Before he left, however, Baker (in conjunction with his predecessor, Patrick Troughton) gave us ‘The Two Doctors’ (1985), a sprawling adventure set both on a station in deep space and on location in Seville, Spain. New alien costumes and effects accompanied the return of another perennial race of villains, the Sontarans, a clone race waging eternal war with their enemies, the shape-changing Rutans. As well as rehearsing familiar multi-Doctor jokes about ‘who is the Doctor?’, the episode raises questions about the persistence of the Doctor’s identity through time and across regenerations. Indeed, SF has always been a particularly fertile ground for speculations about whether significant physical, mental or spiritual changes leave personal identity unchanged.
Doctor Who is therefore not unusual in posing many questions about identity over time and how identity is challenged or reinforced by changes of society and environment.23 At the level of social and political concerns, Doctor Who has always been a playground for the exploration of identities, from the appearance of the Doctor’s ‘evil twin’ Salamander in the Troughton serial ‘The Enemy of the World’ (1967–8) to the self-conscious attempt to offer a more diverse TARDIS crew with the casting of a Doctor with a ‘northern accent’ (Christopher Eccleston) and non-white travellers like Rose Tyler’s boyfriend Mickey Smith (Noel Clarke) and Dr Martha Jones (Freema Agyeman).
In the late 1980s, that diversification began with Sylvester McCoy, the first Scotsman and the seventh actor to play the Doctor on television, and his teaming with ‘street kid’ Ace (Sophie Aldred). After Baker’s sacking, producer John Nathan-Turner found himself in the position of having to find a new Doctor. Having seen McCoy in the National Theatre’s The Pied Piper, a play written especially for him, Nathan-Turner was impressed by McCoy’s energy and the physicality of his performance. ‘I definitely started off playing it for laughs,’ claimed McCoy, whose style of comedy and his pseudonym (he was born Percy James Patrick Kent-Smith) originated from the Ken Campbell Roadshow. In this travelling group of madcap performers, he distinguished himself by ‘setting light to his head, shoving ferrets down his trousers, exploding bombs on his chest, mentally combusting cotton wool and hammering nails up his nose’.24
The lightness of McCoy’s touch barely lasted beyond his first season, as intimations of a darker nature in the Doctor were introduced in what would turn out to be the last two years of the programme’s production. Under the guidance of script editor Andrew Cartmel, proposals were sought after that were not only more ‘funky’ (Cartmel’s term), but also demonstrated more complex motivations from the central characters. Such episodes repaid multiple viewings, and were ‘drama created for the video age, destined to be watched again and again rather than viewed and forgotten, as was so much television made ten years earlier’.25 The series 25 opener, ‘Remembrance of the Daleks’ (1988), was seen by many critics and long-time fans of the programme as the strongest Dalek story since Tom Baker’s 1975 ‘Genesis of the Daleks’ (which also introduced their creator, Davros). The tale suggests that the Doctor is both older than we thought and possesses arcane knowledge of the universe. Again, because of Cartmel’s influence, we saw the most drastic alterations to the Doctor’s character yet – changes that directly paved the way for the portrayal of his later incarnations in the new show after 2005:
The idea emerged of the Doctor as a master strategist, manoeuvring his adversaries and manipulating his allies like a galactic chess player—literally so in the case of [the villain] Fenric in ‘The Curse of Fenric’, although the chess motif was also made explicit in ‘Silver Nemesis’.26
The development of this theme – especially in the ‘Perivale cycle’ of stories marked by a dramatic confrontation between the Time Lord and Ace, his unwilling pawn in ‘The Curse of Fenric’ (1989) – is particularly important for reinforcing the Doctor’s status as an anti-hero, a badge he has worn proudly since the early years. It is also significant for contrasting the Doctor’s attitude towards the ethics of means and ends with the plans of the scripted villains of each story. In 1989, the year the programme was cancelled, Anthony Ainley’s Master made his last television appearance in the aptly named final episode of the classic programme, ‘Survival’. Not only is this Ainley’s finest performance in the role, but the episode also highlights by contrast the increasingly morally ambiguous nature of the Doctor and his aims.
These late-term decisions to inject more pathos into the Doctor’s relationships with his companions and pencil more mystery into the character were the smartest moves made in the ‘middle’ period of Doctor Who, the eight years of Nathan-Turner as producer. But they came to an end in 1989 with the indefinite ‘resting’ of the show, a decision made by the Controller of the BBC. More than six years passed, in which interval the Virgin series of novels Doctor Who: The New Adventures provided more thrills for disappointed fans.
In the cross-Atlantic-produced BBC/Universal Television/ Fox Network telemovie Doctor Who (1996), these themes resurface dramatically: the Doctor cryptically reveals that he is half human and sizable segments of the plot devolve on the efforts of the eighth Doctor (Paul McGann) to make emotional appeals to a new friend, Dr Grace Holloway (Daphne Ashbrook), and an unlikely enemy, gang member Chang Lee (Yee-Jee Tso). Indeed, as Kim Newman has noted, there is a major shift in the characterisation of the protagonist with McGann’s Doctor, who is ‘impulsive, open (if the heart is the centre of feeling, this would explain why McGann has emotion enough for two), eager to share knowledge even if he knows he should keep it to himself’.27 In hindsight, the elements of enhanced character background and relationship development, held in balance with the preservation of the essential mystery of the programme, would be the most significant guideposts as the storytelling of the programme moved into a new phase – a phase that began with a major transformation in how the show would be pitched to a new generation of viewers. One unfortunate consequence of this transformation is that ‘many of the idiosyncrasies of the original Doctor Who are replaced with standardised tropes and terms’ in a twofold effort to make the Doctor more approachable and heroic and to make his universe more comprehensible to fresh audiences.28 For long-time fans, the 1996 telemovie represented a ‘dumbing-down’ of Who. But, philosophically, the new Doctor Who post-1996 shifts away from positivism and the reason- and progress-centred worldview of the Enlightenment and towards Romanticism and the importance of new experiences and diverse sympathies.
According to its most prolific historian, the Enlightenment ‘burst upon the European scene in the late seventeenth century with terrifying force’, creating an ‘unprecedented and, for some, intoxicating, intellectual and spiritual upheaval’.29 The twin brooms of rationalisation and secularisation not only swept aside magic and belief in the supernatural, but inspired a resurgence of scepticism and paved the way for the scientific revolution. For most of its time on the air, the first incarnation of Doctor Who took the prevalent Enlightenment values embedded in the very fabric of the meaning of science fiction as scaffolding for stories: witness stories in which the third Doctor fights against ecological crises on Earth (‘The Claws of Axos’, 1971; ‘The Green Death’) and those in which the fourth Doctor topples oppressive regimes on distant planets (‘The Sun Makers’, 1977; ‘State of Decay’, 1980).
The adjustment of these ideals and values works in favour of the themes of Romanticism, the period of Euro-American intellectual development usually taken to historically supplant the Enlightenment. It is aptly summarised as the view that ‘abstract principle is hollow unless rooted in and expressive of concrete practice’ and that ‘reality is revealed in the first instance by lived experience, in the life world’.30 This perspective is reflected not only in the eighth Doctor’s Byronesque hair and clothing and the ‘Jules Verne’ chic of the new TARDIS console room design. It is present in the very reconceptualisation of the reason for the Doctor’s wanderings as a voyage of self-discovery. This was affirmed in an unused theme for the adventure translated by telemovie scriptwriter Matthew Jacobs: ‘Only when Doctor Who knows who he is will he be able to save us all. Only if you know yourself can you save yourself.’31 The events that made many old-school fans uncomfortable with producer Philip Segal’s Doctor Who (the infamous kiss between the Doctor and Grace – now unremarkable in the new version of the show; the Doctor’s warnings about friends’ and allies’ potential futures; his ‘hash science’ about the beryllium clock and the Eye of Harmony) are precisely what characterises contemporary Doctor Who as the romantic’s ‘science fantasy’. Now, Who becomes concerned with the fates of individuals rather than embracing hard science fiction’s concern with universal themes of progress or justice. One remarkable scene (of many) in the telemovie that underscores this shift occurs when a motorcycle policeman stops the fleeing Doctor and Grace on the verge of a traffic-jammed motorway. The Doctor pulls Grace aside to tell her, ‘I held back death […] I can’t make your dream come true forever, Grace, but I can make it come true today. What do you say?’32
The rebooted 2005 Doctor Who introduces a near-total loss of the Enlightenment ideal. The notion of making the universe a better place to live in is cast into doubt by the catastrophic series of events often referred to by the ninth and tenth Doctors (Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant) as ‘the Last Great Time War’. The fallout from this war, together with the Doctor’s status as its lone survivor,33 are the most distinctive motifs of post-2005 Doctor Who, helmed by executive producers and ‘show-runners’ Russell T. Davies (2005–9) and Steven Moffat (2010–present). Davies, already well known for his Channel 4 drama Queer as Folk, had been a fan of the original programme since 1966 and, 30 years later, had authored Damaged Goods, an entry in Virgin Books’ New Adventures series of original novels featuring seventh Doctor Sylvester McCoy. Damaged Goods provides a partial blueprint for reinventing a legend: ‘the urban settings to firmly place the show in the real world, and the monsters and menaces that affect real people with real emotions’.34 Careful management of the show along these lines, including subtle efforts at humanising the Doctor and his relationships with his companions and those affected by his actions, is largely responsible for the show’s new popularity among the non-anorak-wearing set. Jane Tranter, then-Controller of Drama Commissioning for the BBC, explains the popularity in a different way:
[I]n fact, it’s barely sci-fi. Doctor Who is bigger than that. We’re talking the biggest universal themes, we’re talking the essence of who we are and where we live and what we stand for. We’re talking about the basic fight between good and evil.35
This was a sentiment with which author and editor Harlan Ellison agreed in his introduction to the first US-published Doctor Who novelisations from Pinnacle Books: ‘You, too, can be Doctor Who. You, like the good Doctor, can stand up for that which is bright and bold and true. You can shape the world, if only you’ll go and try.’36
But what if ‘being Doctor Who’ was a less than attractive proposition? Would the programme still be able to retain its lustre? Doctor Who from 2005 to the present has muddied this basic distinction between good and evil, producing more realism and greater dramatic effect. It has also sharpened its characterisation of the Doctor by using themes not only from Romanticism but also from philosophical and literary existentialism, represented by figures such as Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) and Simone de Beauvoir (1908–86). Homelessness, absurdity, the burdens of freedom, and the essential ‘for-itself’ isolation of the self are all existentialist themes that appear in the new Doctor Who.
The Doctor’s good-natured but essentially rootless wandering has since been complicated by his existential angst. This, in turn, is largely fuelled by his bitterness over the losses of the Time War, in which he played an unclear but critical role. In Christopher Eccleston’s second outing as the ninth Doctor, for example, he allows Lady Cassandra O’Brien – the ‘last human’ and the primary antagonist of the story – to die in an exceedingly unpleasant way. All he can offer by way of cold comfort is the epitaph, ‘Everything has its time and everything dies’ (‘The End of the World’, 2005). In a later episode, the Doctor’s horror at being locked in the same room with the last surviving representative of his mortal enemies (‘Dalek’, 2005) is accentuated by the fact that he previously watched them all burn – along with his own people, the Time Lords. The Doctor’s old and antagonistic relationship with the Master (John Simm) – who also apparently survived the Time War – takes on an entirely new dimension as the tenth Doctor, David Tennant, attempts to ‘reform’ him so that they might travel the universe together. Tennant’s incarnation discovers that many of his people, led by the founder of Time Lord society, Rassilon, escaped from a time-locked state within the War and are still alive. However, the tenth Doctor makes the conscious decision to send them back to that state, based on the peril they pose to the cosmos that they once kept watch over. To date, the eleventh Doctor (Matt Smith) seems to have made a certain peace with his singular status, calling himself a ‘madman with a box’ rather than identifying with the more bellicose epithets ‘The Oncoming Storm’ or ‘Destroyer of Worlds’ (Ka Faraq Gatri, in the tongue of the planet Skaro). With Smith leaving at the end of 2013 (and intimations of the Time War resurfacing in ‘The Name of the Doctor’ [2013]), it remains to be seen how this tension will be resolved. For this more whimsical, eccentric version of the Time Lord, the end of the Time War was ‘a bad day’ when ‘bad things happened’ (‘The Beast Below’, 2010).
The programme’s treatment of the nature of time itself has also changed dramatically, not only because of its turn away from hard-science positivism, but also because of the much richer, much more strange nature of the cosmos recently revealed to us by quantum physics. Quantum indeterminacy and quantum entanglement – the notions that extremely small particles do not, at any given point in time, have a set location in space, and that these particles influence other particles vastly distant without causing these different particles to change – have already begun to force scientists and philosophers to rethink our most basic ideas about the architecture of the universe. Doctor Who writers are not known (unlike hard SF writers) for agonising over ‘getting the science right’. Yet we have seen progress from the show’s early linear and causally deterministic notion of ‘time’s arrow’. Implications of this view of time include immutability of the past, found in such early episodes as ‘The Aztecs’ (1964) and ‘The Reign of Terror’ (1964), and the speculative concept of recurring closed causal time-loops (‘The Claws of Axos’; ‘Meglos’, 1981). The pre-quantum understanding of time lends itself to a view of the ‘space–time vortex’ that the TARDIS uses to travel as a kind of hyperspace or hypertime. Steven Moffat, though, seems to favour a view of time that compromises between quantum strangeness and the Doctor’s own intuitive understanding of his native element. ‘People don’t understand time – it’s not what you think it is’, the tenth Doctor claims in the Hugo and BAFTA Award-winning episode ‘Blink’, written by Moffat. ‘People assume that time is a strict progression from cause to effect, but actually – from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint – it’s more like a big ball of wibbley-wobbley, timey-wimey […] stuff’ (‘Blink’, 2007). Such are the slogans from which t-shirts are born.
The history of time, as well as the history and canon of Doctor Who itself, is not a straight line of unbroken continuity. Among the many intriguing themes explored by the world’s longest-running science fantasy programme, its philosophical conundrums and insights simply cannot be summarised in a few pages. From the nature of personal identity to the essence of evil, from the possibility of time travel to the ethics of intervening in history, the philosophy of Doctor Who is bigger on the inside than it appears on the outside. Just precisely what goes on in the mind of a 900-year-old alien who adores jelly babies, little shops and Jammie Dodgers? Step through the double doors of that strange blue box that just materialised on your street corner, and we’ll begin.
Allons-y!