Who made Who?
Answering this question is crucial to understanding the philosophy of Doctor Who. This BBC icon is quite different to other, equally long-standing and impressive science fiction franchises like Star Trek and Star Wars. Yet, from its very beginning, Doctor Who has been a child of multiple authors, unlike the sci-fi brainchildren of single creative figures such as Gene Roddenberry, Terry Nation, George Lucas or Joss Whedon. Doctor Who novel author, fan and critic, Lance Parkin, notes that the programme ‘lacks a clearly identifiable creator’, having ‘no single authority’ either to make rulings on the canonicity of diverse contributions to its ‘Whoniverse’ or to decide the ultimate direction in which the programme might venture.1 There are only three stable elements in the programme – the Doctor, his TARDIS, and his ‘days like crazy paving’ that chart a course between itinerant wandering and saving the known universe. Besides these constants, the formula for good Doctor Who seems to rest on mutability, not invariance. To their credit, the creative influences stoking the fires of the programme at its inception were ahead of their time in meshing together an essentially unfathomed, if not unfathomable protagonist, and the premise of time travel. This would prove to be a plot device of potentially infinite permutations. What unique perspective does this afford the peripatetic Time Lord? What’s the philosophy of the fellow who always comes first when the credits roll, this ‘Doctor Who’?
A short but inestimably valuable document for answering these questions comes from Cecil Edwin Webber, a writer for the BBC’s Script Department in 1963, who was little known save as a mutual copyright holder (with writer Anthony Coburn) to the first episode of the programme, ‘An Unearthly Child’. Webber’s ‘General Notes on Background and Approach’ – elaborations of the original ideas of then-BBC Head of Drama, Sydney Newman – are worth quoting at length:
A frail old man lost in time and space. They give him this name [‘Doctor Who’] because they don’t know who he is. He seems not to remember where he has come from; he is suspicious and capable of sudden malignancy […] he has a machine which enables them to travel together through time, through space, and through matter […] He remains a mystery. From time to time the other three discover things about him, which turn out to be false or inconclusive […] They think he may be a criminal fleeing from his own time.2
There are philosophical resonances here for anyone who seriously considers the meaning of Alfred North Whitehead’s view that ‘Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains.’3 Academic studies of Doctor Who attempting to conceptualise the deep meaning of the programme (compare, for example, Star Trek’s themes of humanism and exploration) have focused on the sense of wonder, born from a narrative dialectic of mystery and discovery, that permeates individual episodes, story arcs and even entire series of Doctor Who. The human propensity for conflict and change drives the dynamics of both philosophy and television drama. This has been true from the start for Who, in which it was conceived that ‘the Doctor and his teenage companion would be the doyens of one alien culture, whose morality and attitudes would lead them into opposition with the two human characters’.4
What is most remarkable about Doctor Who – particularly the ‘classic’ programme (1963–89) – is how this sense of wonder, ‘keep[ing] alive the awe and slight fear felt by strangers in strange lands’,5 is erected on seemingly the flimsiest of foundations – literally. The budget fixed in 1963 for one 25-minute episode was £2,500, roughly £90,100 today (adjusted for inflation, using average earnings) and therefore, as a budget for a half-hour time block, only 20 per cent higher than the most cheaply made sitcoms on British television today. And all this for a production that has always been much more technically demanding than its closest competitor programmes in the UK. One historian of the show, Jeremy Bentham, suggests that Who’s fragile birth-process typifies a more general grudging British attitude towards SF at the time:
In Britain, more so than in other countries, science fiction has always had a stigma attached to it. Considering the technical complexities required, televised science fiction has frequently earned less than proportionately balanced critical response. 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.6
Without a doubt, serials such as The Quatermass Experiment and its sequels, Target Luna and the Pathfinders series of broadcasts, formed the exception to this rule and, at the same time, were highly influential in the creation of Doctor Who. A 1962 BBC Survey Group Report on Science Fiction, examining the potential for the genre, noted that
it is significant that SF is not itself a wildly popular branch of fiction – nothing like, for example, detective and thriller fiction. It doesn’t appeal much to women and largely finds its public in the technically minded younger groups. SF is a most fruitful and exciting area of exploration – but so far has not shown itself capable of supporting a large population.7
The writers of the report, Donald Bull and Alice Frick, noted that the most popular SF theme for a broad audience was ‘Threat and Disaster’ – which Doctor Who would later adapt into one of its most prevalent storylines, the ‘base under siege’ scenario that frames episodes from 1966’s ‘The Tenth Planet’ to 2009’s ‘The Waters of Mars’ and beyond.
Contrasted with their lacklustre appreciation for television SF, the BBC’s audience had not quite yet ended their honeymoon period with edifying television, and the potential for Doctor Who’s pedagogical power outweighed any weaknesses the programme might have as a drama. ‘At the beginning,’ Tulloch and Alvarado claim, ‘Doctor Who was seriously concerned with helping to teach history and science.’8 Upon close examination, only the original 1963–4 series’ historicals (‘Marco Polo’; ‘The Aztecs’; ‘The Reign of Terror’) and one story each from the following two seasons, ‘The Crusade’ (1965) and ‘The Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Eve’ (1966), earn high marks for teaching history seriously. While the production team in these instances clearly pays greater attention to detail and carefully avoids anachronisms, all these stories are told straightforwardly through the lens of dramatic conflict.
Yet, despite the Doctor’s characteristic pro-science, anti-supernatural stance, Doctor Who’s own record on scientific education was not as robust. Tulloch and Alvarado explain this odd fact by noting that ‘the programme has not been surrounded by the plethora of professional and university scientists that the early science fiction magazines in the USA had on their editorial boards’.9 They also note that Doctor Who’s educative underpinnings can be traced far more clearly to ‘the investigation of different cultures through space and time, rather than seeking an involvement with hard science’.10 In turn, this is carried out in the context of a Pygmalion-like relationship of tutelage and coaching between Doctor and companion that resolves in the most memorable teamings: the second Doctor and Jamie McCrimmon; the fourth Doctor and Leela; the seventh Doctor and Ace; the ninth Doctor and Rose. While the admitted paternalism of this relationship diminishes as it evolves, it was first a clever way, in more conservative TV days, of teaming a male and female without reference to a romantic relationship. When confronted by ‘the shock of the new’, the difference in values and stances between the seasoned time traveller and the starry-eyed rookie has been another of the dramatic selling points of Doctor Who throughout its long run. It began with an itinerant wanderer through the universe who, because of his admiration for the human race, becomes a teacher to some of them, all within the context of an edifying television programme aimed at placing its young viewers squarely in the middle of the action. In its beginnings, at least, Doctor Who provided a perfect convergence of identification between the Doctor’s young companions and its target audience.
Like its American counterparts, adventurous British television SF of this period often framed its narratives not only in terms of educational impact but also in terms of the possibilities afforded by new technology. Particularly in Doctor Who episodes from the 1960s and 70s, the promises and pitfalls of applied technology – from oil drilling in the North Sea, to microcomputing, to nuclear power – drive numerous plots. The very premises of the show rely on the Doctor’s credentials as ‘every kind of scientist’, and the Doctor’s TARDIS11 – a cross between a spaceship and a magic portal to distant worlds – presents itself as the ultimate expression of the expectation of rational solutions to society’s problems. This is the basis for scientific empiricism and its modern philosophical programme, positivism.12
The first positivist was the philosopher of science and self-described ‘sociologist’, Auguste Comte (1798–1857). Previous to Comte’s work, philosophical examinations of changeable human nature had been considered mere ‘anthropology’, inferior to what we today would call the physical sciences. Comte created a periodisation of humanity’s efforts to explain strange phenomena and gain further control over its environment. According to him, we have passed through two stages – the religious and the metaphysical – and are embarking on the last stage: the scientific.
The question then was, according to Comte, what to do with religious or metaphysical claims that might compete with scientific claims? The critical tool that many positivists found most useful for advancing a ‘science of human nature’ was Hume’s Fork, named after the Scottish philosopher, historian and bon vivant David Hume (1711–76). Hume claimed that all assertions – for example, ‘TARDIS is an acronym having six letters’ or ‘The Sontaran clones number in the billions’ – could be separated into two classes. The first example is what Hume calls a ‘relation of ideas’, which comprises definitions and mathematical-geometrical formulae that are axiomatic, necessarily true and tautologous. The relation of ideas specified by ‘All triangles have three internal angles’ is true of every triangle, past, present and future, but it gives us no new information about triangles that we didn’t already know from the definition of ‘triangle’. On the other hand, the second example regarding Sontarans is a ‘matter of fact’, an assertion that is neither axiomatic nor necessarily true, and which requires observations of states of affairs in the world to determine its truth. Thus, every statement we could make about the world – scientific, theological, ethical – would either be a relation of ideas, a matter of fact, or neither, in which case the statement could be classed as meaningless.
This would provide a tool capable of dethroning (but not destroying) theology and metaphysics. In its methods, positivism ‘was both descriptive and normative, describing how human thought had in fact evolved and prescribing norms for how our thinking […] should proceed’.13 Its nineteenth- and twentieth-century appeal was rooted in the popularisation of the fruits of the scientific revolution, before there was any critical public understanding of the difference between ‘science’ and ‘non-science’. Perhaps Comte was naively optimistic when he claimed that in the medieval and early modern periods of Western intellectual history, ‘the primitive speculative exercises of mankind originated a theological philosophy which was modified more and more, and at length destroyed, without any possibility of its being replaced’.14 But, historically, his view not only retrieved the promise of the French Revolution from its nadir in the Reign of Terror; it also bound together two Weltanschauungen – two worldviews – that dominated European thought in the nineteenth century. One of these was the belief in inevitable human progress; the other was a kind of evolutionary ethics, which at that time implied that the intellectual elite ought to explicitly support broad social processes (like Herbert Spencer’s ‘social survival of the fittest’) that were going on in any case.
The development of societies and economies through stages expressing a coherent, logical vision was not unique to Comte, but also distinguished the thought of the Germans Georg W.F. Hegel (1770–1831), Johann Fichte (1762–1814) and, of course, Karl Marx (1818–83). While this theme of the upwardly progressive movement of history might have been lost by the twentieth century, its normative force as an idea critical of non-empirical metaphysics and theology was sustained. In his short book Language, Truth and Logic, A.J. Ayer (1910–89) popularised and succinctly summed up a distinctly ‘logical’ positivism as the view that ‘there is no field of experience which cannot, in principle, be brought under some form of scientific law, and no type of speculative knowledge about the world which it is, in principle, beyond the power of science to give’.15 The slogan of the ‘Vienna Circle’, a formal working group of logical empiricist philosophers and scientists founded in 1924, was ‘the scientific world-conception serves life and life receives it’.16 The most general aim of the group was an essentially Comtean one: to permeate culture with the ethos of logical argumentation and the explanatory power of science in an effort to replace metaphysical or theological Weltanschauungen with a scientific ‘world-conception’. What positivism and logical empiricism were advocating was no less than a new phase to the Enlightenment.
Of course, there are always at least six degrees of separation between how an idea is deployed in philosophy and how it appears in popular culture. Nonetheless, philosophical positivism and empiricism in SF literature are foregrounded as the master ideas behind what is often called ‘hard science fiction’, a term coined in 1957. The nursery for hard science fiction was found in the exponential scientific and technological growth of the early twentieth century. Its proving-ground was the 1950s and 60s, when Sputnik and Project Mercury seemed to confirm that space was ‘viewed as the forefront of active life, the region where the future is made rather than talked about or run away from’.17 In the view of David G. Hartwell, co-editor of the Year’s Best Science Fiction anthologies and an historian of science fiction, hard SF can be recognised by the following characteristics:
Positivism was ably represented in the period of Doctor Who’s genesis by American authors such as Isaac Asimov and Hal Clement, and in British SF by Sir Arthur C. Clarke. Many of their successes can be attributed to the way in which their fiction capitalised on the potential for secular salvation represented by technology and a scientific understanding of human nature. This was a dream that, while appearing desperate in tone in SF of the 1930s (for example, Jack Williamson’s 1938 Legion of Time, which made accessible the ideas of causal determinism and alternate futures), became increasingly more upbeat over the next three decades. It was fuelled, no doubt, by the novelty of American and Russian space missions, which represented a transformation in human abilities not merely of scale, but upwards towards an entirely different stratum.
Elements of the positivistic or empiricist worldview abound in early Doctor Who, particularly in the period from 1963 to around 1974, when a pro-science, pro-technology attitude was seen as the key philosophical guidepost available to the scriptwriters charged with making future-based Doctor Who stories edifying. Many plots were driven – especially in the Hartnell and Troughton years – by the Doctor’s scientific superiority as well as his curiosity. Take this exchange from ‘An Unearthly Child’, for instance. Ian and Barbara have entered the TARDIS for the first time, and Ian claims that it all must be an illusion:
DOCTOR: (coughing) You don’t understand, so you find excuses. Illusions, indeed? You say you can’t fit an enormous building into one of your smaller sitting rooms?
IAN: No.
DOCTOR: But you’ve discovered television, haven’t you?
IAN: Yes …
DOCTOR: Then by showing an enormous building on your television screen, you can do what seemed impossible, couldn’t you?
IAN: Well … yes, but I still don’t know …
DOCTOR: It’s not quite clear, is it? I can see by your face that you’re not certain. You don’t understand. (He laughs.) And I knew you wouldn’t! Never mind. Now then, which switch was it …? No, no, no … Ah yes, that is it! (He flips the switch.) The point is not whether you understand … (He turns back to Ian.) What is going to happen to you, hmm?21
Typically, the Doctor’s sense of scientific superiority is used to break technological deadlocks that other characters have failed to deal with. In the episodes ‘The Sensorites’ (1964) and ‘The Ark’ (1966), the Doctor crafts remedies for poisons and viruses that manage to confound the scientifically advanced civilisations he visits. On the planet Vortis, he deals with the unusual phenomenon of organic technology and the mind-control of giant insects (‘The Web Planet’, 1965). The Doctor’s eccentric, yet brilliant problem solving is characteristically deployed in the face of force used in vain and the defeatism of others in 1964’s ‘The Dalek Invasion of Earth’. Trapped in a cell aboard the enemy’s space-going saucer, the Doctor and Ian are filled in by another prisoner, Jack Craddock, as to how the monstrous Daleks invaded the Earth in the twenty-second century. Rather than give up, the Doctor analyses a device in the cell obviously made for Dalek manipulators, and concludes that it must hold the key to their escape. The Doctor struggles to find the ‘correct refractive index’ for the device, while Craddock derides his efforts. ‘They have only contempt for human intellect,’ the Doctor says to him, referencing their alien captors, ‘and if all their prisoners are like you, I’m not so sure they’re wrong.’22 Stories from later Hartnell seasons provide instances of other familiar positivistic hard SF tropes, from the epic space opera and temporal shenanigans of the 12-part story ‘The Dalek Masterplan’ (1965–6) to the ‘life-force’ draining machines and the Doctor’s strange ‘Reacting Vibrator’ of ‘The Savages’ (1966).
Throughout, the Doctor steadfastly defends the scientific method and espouses philosophical naturalism: the view that the methods of philosophical inquiry ought to more or less align with those of science. He is also a harsh critic of supernatural or occult explanations for phenomena. In 1971’s ‘The Dæmons’, companion Jo Grant sets the third Doctor a difficult problem that illustrates the ‘anti-metaphysical’ arguments of positivism: ‘Suppose something was to happen and nobody knew the explanation,’ she says, trying to convince the Doctor that the magical ‘age of Aquarius’ has finally arrived. ‘Well, nobody in the world – in the universe! Well, that would be magic, wouldn’t it?’23
Jo’s position has the flavour of what is often called a ‘god of the gaps’ argument. These arguments infer the need to posit a supernatural force because of the possibility of inexplicable, yet very real occurrences (like miracles). There are two immediate problems with Jo’s view: first, it needs to be shown (and not merely assumed) that mysterious phenomena are inexplicable rather than merely currently unexplained. The Doctor makes a counter-argument by demonstrating the ability of his yellow roadster, Bessie, to drive around the tarmac seemingly on its own. Jo’s amazement is short-lived when the Doctor reveals a remote control device as the source of the illusion, converting the ‘inexplicable’ to the easily explained.
The second issue with Jo’s argument is philosophically more interesting. In the case of a genuinely dumbfounding occurrence, how would we know that there is no one in the entire universe who knows an explanation for it? And would the lack of a known explanation necessarily imply that there was no explanation? These questions became the focus of key twentieth-century European thinkers influential to positivism and the logical empiricists of the Vienna Circle. These included Ludwig Wittgenstein and his book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Rudolf Carnap, author of The Logical Construction of the World. Wittgenstein and Carnap utilised the conceptual resources of logic and science to erect a systematic approach for addressing what could and could not be counted as legitimate explanations. The approach, widely popularised as ‘logical positivism’ by Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic but also called ‘logical empiricism’, was based on Wittgenstein’s ‘principle of verifiability’. In effect, this principle responds to Jo Grant’s appeal, saying (a) that any claim regarding a mysterious phenomenon, to be meaningful, would have to meet strict ‘rules of observation’ in its description, and (b) that a meaningful potential explanation of that phenomenon would have to be, in principle, verifiable by exacting logical or empirical standards. The focus on meaning here replaces the early modern epistemological question asked by figures such as John Locke and René Descartes: ‘How do we know with certainty that something is the case?’24
Wittgenstein claimed (and Moritz Schlick of the Vienna Circle coined the slogan) that ‘the meaning of a proposition is the method of its verification’.25 The mere possibility that a particular proposition, such as ‘The Doctor restarted the universe using the Pandorica and a second Big Bang’, could be actualised is no proof that it is meaningful. For Wittgenstein, ‘it is the deep logical grammar of language that governs how its elements combine to form propositions and also which propositions follow from which others’.26 We can see this in his Tractatus, wherein ‘names’ are the fundamental units bearing meaning while each such name correlates with an ‘object’ in the world. At a more complex level in which names are conjoined in logically well-formed sentences, propositions ‘picture’ certain states of affairs in the world. Meaningful propositions are not only those that ‘picture’ true states of affairs, but also those that, while not directly observed, can be inferred from other true propositions. This, then, is the idea of verifiability in Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle. Meanwhile, Ayer’s ‘modified verification principle’ takes on board the scientific virtue of recognising human fallibility – our ability to get it wrong even in the best of times. It doesn’t demand that every proposition be ‘conclusively verifiable’, but instead,
that some possible sense-experience should be relevant to the determination of its truth or falsehood. If a putative proposition fails to satisfy this principle, and is not a tautology, then I hold that it is metaphysical, and that, being metaphysical, it is neither true nor false but literally senseless. It will be found that much of what ordinarily passes for philosophy is metaphysical according to this criterion, and, in particular, that it can not be significantly asserted that there is a non-empirical world of values, or that men have immortal souls, or that there is a transcendent God.27
While Wittgenstein was to write a later book (Philosophical Investigations) picking apart his own theory, particularly its reliance on the idea of propositions ‘picturing’ reality, and while Ayer eventually resolved that the main problem with logical positivism was that ‘nearly all of it was false’,28 it is important to remember that logical positivism or empiricism is a philosophical position that reflects a longitudinal segment of the empiricist mindset in general. It not only represents an active force of cultural secularisation, but also proposes a ‘logical’, if not wholly scientific, approach to Western ethics, which seemed increasingly poised to slide into relativism in the later twentieth century. Its own drawbacks alone do not show that philosophical analysis ought to avoid focusing on language as the carrier of meaning, or that the reduction of complex fields of phenomena to simpler ones cannot be the task of a critical philosophy.
Doctor Who has proved that it is comfortable holding its own positivist origins in tension with its respect for limits of experience and the potentially unverifiable. In the early stages of what could be called its ‘post-positivist’ era (from 1974 to the present), the programme’s production staff often went to great pains to ridicule the idea of the kind of organised scientific hegemony proposed by the supporters of Unified Science as a replacement religion or, worse, as a cult. ‘Robot’ (1974–5), Tom Baker’s first outing as the Doctor, demonstrates that even the most helpful and informative members of the ‘Think Tank’ organisation can turn out to be little more than scientifically literate fascists – here in the form of the Scientific Reform Society. Closer to the end of Baker’s tenure, the society of the planet Tigella in ‘Meglos’ is divided between deeply devotional Deons and scoffing, rationalist Savants. Uncharacteristically, the Doctor doesn’t land on Tigella by accident, but is summoned by the planetary leader to head off a potential culture war because the Doctor ‘sees the threads that bind the universe and mends them when they break’. Much earlier than these stories, though, the strongest anti-positivist story from Doctor Who’s first decade must be counted as ‘The Tomb of the Cybermen’ (1967), starring Patrick Troughton. The villain of the piece, Eric Klieg (George Pastell), finances an archaeological expedition to the planet Telos, reported to be a base of the Cybermen, who have largely disappeared from the galaxy. When Klieg schemes to revivify the Cybermen from their icy hibernation in the bowels of the planet, he informs the expedition leader that he is a member of the ‘Brotherhood of Logicians’ and thus his motivation is ‘logic, my dear Professor, logic and power. On Earth the Brotherhood of Logicians is the greatest intelligence man ever assembled. But that is not enough, we need power. Power to put our ability into action. The Cybermen have this power.’ Klieg’s logic in thinking the Cybermen will prove reliable allies is faulty, and the Doctor knows better:
DOCTOR: Yes, as you say, such a combination between intelligence and power would make you formidable indeed! Why you’d be commander of the universe with your brilliance! It … it makes the imagination reel with the possibilities!
KLIEG: Why Doctor, if I had only known you shared my imagination. You might even have worked for me!
DOCTOR: Perhaps it’s not too late?
JAMIE: Doctor!
DOCTOR: No Jamie, don’t you see? Don’t you see what this is going to all mean to those who come to serve ‘Klieg the all powerful’? Why, no country, no person would dare to have a single thought that was not your own! Eric Klieg’s own conception of the … of the way of life!
KLIEG: Brilliant! Yes … yes you’re right. Master of the world! (He smiles, gazing into the distance.)
DOCTOR: And now I know you’re mad, I just wanted to make sure.29
Again, the Doctor sees further. What separates Doctor Who from hard SF – indeed, the programme is more properly called ‘science fantasy’, with the only SF elements in some episodes being the alien Doctor and his time vehicle – is the consistent de jure commitment of the production team to science and physicalist explanations, while de facto they take full advantage of Arthur C. Clarke’s famous ‘Third Law’: ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’30 However, this blurring of the lines between hard-headed rationalism and the fantastic limits of the possible is better epitomised, in my own estimation, by how Clarke’s ‘First Law’ resonates with the first Doctor’s adventures: ‘When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.’31
The Doctor regularly flirts with sufficiently advanced pseudo-science like the trusty ‘slightly psychic paper’ and the sonic screwdriver. He manifests a kind of practical knowledge that seems to be uncanny for a human. Before he has even set foot in the new Post Office Tower, where he meets the supercomputer WOTAN in ‘The War Machines’ (1966), the first Doctor has a small fit, telling his companion, ‘You know, there’s something alien about that tower! I can sense it!’ He claims that he gets the same feeling whenever the Daleks are near. Much later, the fourth Doctor will ape his own heightened sensibilities by pronouncing that his hair curling is a sign that ‘it’s either going to rain … or that I’m on to something’. The ability of the Doctor to take in far more knowledge than seems feasible from a simple examination of his environment echoes the notion from early modern philosophy of an ‘intellectual intuition’. This would be an act of perception in which one gains seemingly inscrutable knowledge directly from the five senses without the necessity of coming to a judgement about them or applying concepts to them. It is a bit of narrative genius that firmly places Doctor Who in the science fantasy camp, and yet it is philosophically troublesome.
Readers who are very familiar with the programme under discussion, particularly in its rebooted form from 2005 to the present, have probably been struggling for an understanding of precisely how to characterise the Doctor as a positivist. Admirers of the Doctor’s romantic, humanist side might note the significant variance between the Doctor’s status as an advocate of science, on the one hand, versus the slip into scientism, on the other. This is, of course, a variance that depends on any particular Doctor’s era. Scientism, a view at least some positivists held, claims that the methods of science, applied to any area of human inquiry (including politics and ethics), can produce better results than a non-scientific approach. In contradistinction to many pieces of hard SF-inspired fiction, Doctor Who often subverts scientistic pretensions: in the first series alone, the plot strands of ‘The Daleks’ (1964) are woven through the almost crystallised, neutron-bomb-devastated landscape of the planet Skaro, highlighting writer Terry Nation’s fascination with the outcomes of technological warfare, while ‘The Edge of Destruction’ (1964) – still the programme’s only ‘bottle show’ confining all the action to the interior of the TARDIS – surprised viewers with the intimation that the Doctor’s ship is not merely an implausibly complex machine, but has a degree of sentience and intentionality. In ‘The Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Eve’, the humanist side of the Doctor emerges at the end of a harrowing adventure in which a young Protestant girl, Anne Chaplet, is left to the mercy of the Catholic guards on the eponymous eve. ‘[H]istory sometimes gives us a terrible shock, and that is because we don’t quite fully understand. Why should we?’ he asks Steven Taylor (Peter Purves), his companion. ‘After all, we’re all too small to realise its final pattern. Therefore don’t try and judge it from where you stand.’ The corruptibility of chemical scientists was explored in the Silent Spring storyline of ‘Planet of the Giants’ (1965), and in ‘The Macra Terror’ (1967), on a colony world controlled by mutant crabs in the future, the second Doctor claims that ‘reason is the last thing you must expect in this or any other world’.32 While none of these instances demonstrates a complete rejection of the reliance on scientific methods, the history of Western philosophy is often written as if its audience must come down on one side or another of a tradition, supporting either positivism or pure faith.33
For another thing, the Doctor is as much a phenomenologist as he is a physicist or computer scientist. He is not only attentive to the phenomena or, in simpler terms, ‘extremely good at recognising things so obvious that nobody else sees them at all’,34 but he derives great pleasure and significance from the simplest elements of experience. Against the leader of a platoon of Cybermen, creatures that have engineered emotions away entirely, the fifth Doctor rails, ‘When did you last have the pleasure of smelling a flower, watching a sunset, eating a well-prepared meal?’ The Cyber-leader claims, ‘These things are irrelevant’, to which the Doctor replies, ‘For some people, small, beautiful events is what life is all about!’35
As a way of philosophising, phenomenology questions what is taken for granted in scientific observation and generalisation. Edmund Husserl’s (1859–1938) method for phenomenology makes a fundamental discovery: the world that positivism ‘strips bare’ through the principle of verifiability is not the world as it really is, but is an abstraction from a common, ‘lived’ world. The practices of scientific and mathematical modelling of the world presuppose a meaningful yet transparent ‘natural standpoint’ of experience:
Perhaps I am busied with pure numbers and the laws they symbolise: nothing of this sort is present in the world around me, this world of ‘real fact’. And yet the world of numbers also is there for me, as the field of objects with which I am arithmetically busied […] The arithmetical world is there for me only when and so long as I occupy the arithmetical standpoint. But the natural world, the world in the ordinary sense of the word, is constantly there for me, so long as I live naturally and look in its direction. I am then at the ‘natural standpoint’, which is just another way of stating the same thing.36
Husserl contributes a new understanding of what constitutes awareness, emphasising not only the need to ‘shift frames’ to take in detail properly (he calls this ‘bracketing’) but also our attentiveness to the ‘life-world’, a layer of pre-theoretical experience ‘to be inserted between the world of nature and the world of culture (or spirit)’ that should be seen as ‘the ultimate horizon of human experience’.37 While the Doctor can play the role of the alien, he is also able to isolate portions of the human life-world obscure to the rest of us for further inquiry. In ‘The Beast Below’, the eleventh Doctor repeatedly uses Sherlock-like inference to the best explanation to draw startling conclusions from the appearance of a crying child, urging companion Amy Pond, ‘Look closer. Secrets and shadows. Lives led in fear.’ A porcelain mask and perfectly still glasses of water on a moving starship also prove to be important, if unlikely, clues to the mystery at the heart of the episode.
Beyond Edmund Husserl’s focus on the distinctive type of knowledge that phenomenology brings to the table, a crucial phenomenological element in Doctor Who’s formula is our sense of the uncanny, or what Kingsley Amis generally calls ‘a non-rational sense of insecurity’.38 If positivism proceeds as though the underlying structure of the universe is fundamentally rationally ascertainable, the phenomenological philosophy of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) plumbs the dark possibility that our being is fundamentally irrational (or, at best, arational). Heidegger’s frequent use of the term unheimlich, the ‘uncanny’,39 underscores the sentiments of Susan Foreman’s teacher Barbara Wright as she waits in the fog outside a lonely junkyard in ‘An Unearthly Child’: ‘It’s silly, isn’t it? I feel frightened … as if we’re about to interfere in something that is best left alone.’ The specific nature of Barbara’s fear is intriguing, Heidegger would say, because it has no object – it is of the unknown. ‘All fear finds its ground in dread,’ he claims, and ‘dread can “befall” us right in the midst of the most familiar environment.’40
Barbara was more or less correct. She and Ian would soon be meeting the Doctor, the ‘ultimate outsider’, a character possessing an alien je ne sais quoi that Verity Lambert, the first producer of the programme, called ‘totally anti-establishment’ – even to the extent of alienating those more traditionally against the establishment.41 As Jim Leach observes, ‘Although the Doctor is a scientist, he has an ingrained distrust of technology, and his use of the scientific method is much more flexible than those human scientists who simply dismiss anything that cannot be explained rationally.’42 As a result, he is also deeply humanistic in his attitudes. Even when he occasionally plays the mythological ‘trickster’ role (Patrick Troughton’s high jinks in ‘The Highlanders’ as the German ‘Doktor von Wer’ and Matt Smith’s ‘I’m a monk’ scene in ‘A Good Man Goes to War’ [2011] come immediately to mind), the Doctor struggles to reconcile the limited cosmological perspective of his (usually twentieth-century-human) fellow travellers with his greater knowledge and technological prowess. A potential new companion’s acid test is when she first steps through the TARDIS doors and attempts to wrap her mind around the impossibility of a larger space contained inside a smaller one. We must imagine that the discontinuity (were it real) would be wrenching enough to be felt viscerally. One fellow time traveller who required rather less support after entering the Doctor’s ship was Leela (Louise Jameson), a member of a ‘primitive’ tribe from the far future which was really the remnants of a degenerated human colony. In ‘The Robots of Death’ (1977) the fourth Doctor explains trans-dimensionality to Leela by placing a large box on the TARDIS’s central console some distance from where she holds a considerably smaller box. This forced perspective brings her to acknowledge that the larger box appears smaller, just so long as it is further away:
DOCTOR: Now which one is larger?
LEELA: (pointing to the large box on the console) That one.
DOCTOR: But it looks smaller.
LEELA: Well, that’s because it’s further away.
DOCTOR: Exactly. If you could keep that exactly that distance away and have it here, the large one would fit inside the small one.
LEELA: That’s silly.
DOCTOR: That’s trans-dimensional engineering, a key Time Lord discovery.43
The Doctor often claims that he is ‘of no fixed abode’, and the TARDIS’s status as a mobile headquarters for the wanderings of Time Lord and companions is a further gesture towards the unheimlich themes of Doctor Who. Efforts at fleshing out the daily life of the TARDIS crew by showing bedrooms, food machines – even a swimming pool – never seem to last for long. Just as the location of the Doctor’s vehicle is constantly in flux, so the interior seems to be as well.
Companions and enemies alike boggle at the capacities of the Doctor’s TARDIS, which is the most advanced piece of scientific equipment they’ve ever seen. Yet this ‘Time and Relative Dimension(s) in Space’ machine is capricious, erratic, unreliable and (sometimes, quite literally) seems to have a mind of its own. This lack of fit between the ultra-sophisticated device and its anachronistic-looking operator is exploited profitably in Doctor Who to motivate a variety of storylines, particularly the creepy telepathic presence driving the TARDIS crew to violence in 1964’s ‘The Edge of Destruction’. The TARDIS’s ability to travel anywhere in time and space has a contestable value – blessing or curse? – that is increasingly presented as the most important theme of the show. Evidence of this tension ranges from the very first episode in which the Doctor protests to a companion, ‘But you can’t rewrite history. Not one line!’44 to the remarkable story arc of the 2011 series, in which the Doctor is shot and killed in the first act of the first episode and the rest of the series is spent trying both to save him and to find out ‘whodunnit’. Of course, the uncanny nature of time travel, both in the inscrutability of its premise and in its wildly unpredictable consequences, is not an original theme. It dates back to The Time Machine, H.G. Wells’s 1895 novella that was also the inspiration for the Doctor’s exploits.
One of the most poignant themes of Wells’s Time Machine is the anxiety that the time traveller faces whenever he contemplates how far he is from home and whether he will ever see that home again.45 It seems that SF’s time machines are constructed not merely as vehicles but as vehicles of radical emigration. The TARDIS takes young people yearning for adventure away from their homes, occasionally makes them homesick, often deposits them in new homes, and allows the Doctor to avoid a home that he despises and that he later claims he destroyed. The centrelessness of the Doctor’s travels is one of the programme’s unique charms. But why all this not-being-at-home is significant as a phenomenological theme may not be immediately clear.
As this discussion of the uncanny indicates, phenomenology, while just as concerned with truth and knowledge as positivism, treats the question of the nature and justification of knowledge as an occasional focus within a far wider field of human experience. Phenomenologists don’t circumscribe the range of human experience narrowly, as was done by earlier theorists like Locke and Immanuel Kant, both of whom claimed to have found the limits of our capability to know the world and ourselves. However, Husserl often referred to the human ability to be affected by our environment in rich and diverse ways as ‘transcendence’, and referred to the limits of the life-world as a ‘horizon’, which is constantly shifting temporally and culturally. Existential phenomenologists like Heidegger, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre described human existence (as opposed to biology or psychology) in terms of the fundamental attitude towards change and ‘becoming’. This is the attitude of projecting cares and projects into the not-yet-determined future: a comportment unique in the world because of the promise of human freedom and the recognition of the fullness of one’s possibilities. The human way of being, what Heidegger calls Dasein, is sketched richly and suggestively, if not always clearly or comprehensively, by the existentialists’ foregrounding of concepts like ‘freedom’, ‘existence’ and ‘authenticity’. Other examinations of theirs falling outside the remit of science (at least that of the time) focused on the understanding of fundamental ‘structures’ of first-person subjectivity: moods and emotions. Despite the fact that he is not human, the Doctor amalgamates and concentrates some of the most distinctive phenomenological elements of Heidegger’s Dasein. The Doctor is ontologically akin to Dasein because he ‘is, though as the being-on-the way of itself to itself’, in Heidegger’s words. In a constant flurry of action – particularly in his younger-looking incarnations – the Doctor is always ahead of himself. The preternatural drive in the Doctor’s being to seek out danger is unheimlich itself, in the sense that he is always taking an ‘anticipatory leap forward: not positing an end, but reckoning with being-on-the-way, giving it free play, disclosing it, holding fast to being-possible’.46 Heidegger was undoubtedly thinking of the Doctor when he approvingly quoted Søren Kierkegaard: ‘Life can be interpreted only after it has been lived.’
The existential phenomenologist’s view of what is most foundational in human experience contrasts rather starkly with that of the positivists using Hume’s Fork. The latter are concerned with answering the question ‘How are our assertions about the world meaningful?’ in terms of cognition and truth, while existential phenomenology takes a pre-cognitive stance, one we might call ‘practical-orientative’. So, when Heidegger writes, ‘To the everydayness of being-in-the-world there belongs certain modes of concern’, he means not only that authentic existence requires no proof of the external world but also that our ‘way of being-in-the-world’ is characterised by the dually cognitive and affective stance of concern or ‘care’.47 We are ‘always already’ living in a world shot through with meaning and significance, even before we start to make or assess claims to knowledge.
It goes without saying that the Doctor’s curiosity and extended sense of care (particularly for planet Earth) has placed him and his companions in trouble innumerable times. He also waxes existential from time to time; when the fourth Doctor is asked whether he is from outer space, he replies, ‘I’m more from what you would call inner time’ (‘The Stones of Blood’, 1978). Most often, however, the Doctor simply sighs in the face of his Heideggerian homelessness. There seem to be three chapters to the Doctor’s dispossession. Throughout the 1960s, the Doctor offers few details of his origin. The place in which he would belong is a blank, a pure negation. Both where he comes from and the source of his authority are constantly in question, particularly at key points when he engages foes of cosmic proportions like the Monk, a less benevolent fellow time traveller, and the mad, surreal Celestial Toymaker. In ‘The Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Eve’, he proposes that a cure for his melancholy could be to return home, but he simply cannot.
With the second Doctor’s trial at the conclusion of ‘The War Games’ (1969) and his forcible regeneration, his relationship to his fellow Time Lords (now revealed) transforms into an adversarial one. Now the Doctor must play the role of anti-authoritarian agent. He is set against both his own people and the martial excesses of UNIT, the paramilitary organisation introduced in ‘The Invasion’ (1968). Thus the programme’s central character is recast as a renegade or pariah, with the Time Lords representing an advanced yet officious, stagnant and ultimately corrupt culture.48 This representation of the Doctor reaches its apogee in the avant-garde figure of the fourth Doctor, who uses the Time Lords’ own Byzantine political code against them to allow alien invaders to occupy Gallifrey (‘The Invasion of Time’, 1978), and in the breathlessly active fifth Doctor, running away from his homeworld yet again despite the Time Lords’ professed need for him to step in as president in ‘The Five Doctors’.
For twenty-first-century, ‘new’ Doctor Who, producer Russell T. Davies would change the dynamic of home and homelessness for the Doctor yet again, giving the eponymous Time Lord the credit (or blame?) for entirely destroying Gallifrey at the conclusion of the Last Great Time War. This was a radical change in the show, but it had been tried before, namely in the novel series published by BBC Books between 1997 and 2005. A particularly baroque entry in that series by Peter Anghelides and Stephen Cole, The Ancestor Cell, has the eighth Doctor confronting Faction Paradox, a voodoo-like cult of Gallifreyans, and destroying Gallifrey as a result. For the new television series, Russell Davis opined:
I wanted the Doctor to be a loner […] That’s why the Time Lords had to go, it was a programme coming back with an awful lot of mythology and back story, and I wanted to give it a background in which fans and brand new viewers would be on a level playing field.49
Russell believed that audiences would be more existentially empathetic when watching a lonely traveller than when seeing someone claiming, ‘I come from a great big planet full of powerful people.’ Little is said about Gallifrey until ‘Gridlock’ (2007), when the tenth Doctor finally opens up to fellow traveller Martha Jones, a cathartic moment when he mentions losing ‘family and friends’ in the Time War. ‘Oh, you should have seen it! That old planet,’ he sighs. ‘The second sun would rise in the south, and the mountains would shine. The leaves on the trees were silver, when they caught the light, every morning it looked like a forest on fire. When the autumn came, a brilliant glow through the branches.’
While the Doctor exhibits melancholia for an actual place, existential phenomenology posits an analogous metaphysical homelessness that has the potential to affect anyone, even those of us who haven’t locked the last members of our species in a time-loop for eternity. Doctor Who’s sense of the uncanny is tied to the metaphysical homelessness of its protagonist in at least two ways. Because the Doctor and company always pull up stakes at the end of each adventure, there is a pervasive lack of closure to his involvement in affairs and a lingering sense of the unfinished and absent. For the existential phenomenologist, how we face this lack of closure determines the degree to which our response to our own freedom is authentic. Simone de Beauvoir explains:
One may hesitate to make oneself a lack of being, one may withdraw before existence, or one may falsely assert oneself as being, or assert oneself as nothingness. One may realise his freedom only as an abstract independence, or, on the contrary, reject with despair the distance which separates us from being.50
We can also understand the other sense of the Doctor’s homelessness in terms of Heidegger’s idea of ‘the worldhood of the world’ and the distance from that ‘worldhood’ that time travel creates for the traveller. While the uncanny can be equated with absence, Heidegger conceives ‘worldhood’ as what is present, in the sense of what constitutes a ‘referential totality’ of ‘everyday concern’. From the perspective of positivism and of ‘Laplace’s demon’, though, the character of the ‘worldhood’ of the world is precisely what goes missing. This ‘demon’ is an iconic figure in the history of philosophy and mathematics representing the perspective of a ‘god’s-eye point of view’. Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749–1827), an astronomer and advisor to Napoleon Bonaparte, spoke of an intelligence that could perceive the framework of the universe as a three-dimensional matrix of objects and events, all moving forward in regular tempo towards the future. ‘We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future’, Laplace comments. He continues:
An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.51
For this ‘demon’ (imagine a cross between the aforementioned Klieg of the Brotherhood of Logicians and the Beast imprisoned in ‘The Satan Pit’ [2006]), the universe is the sum total of all spaces, and cause and effect neatly regulate the transmission of matter across spaces. This is, above all, an orderly universe, one that completes the vision of Laplace’s fellow Frenchman, René Descartes, of the cosmos as a well-oiled machine.
However, according to Heidegger, this is a world deprived of its essential ‘worldhood’, or the presence of a primordial level of meaning in which things make sense because they refer, in our experience, to other things, events and experiences. Our experience, for Heidegger, is one of constant and unreflective interpretation of the world as a ‘referential totality’ – converting, for instance, ‘spaces’ into ‘places’ and ‘objects’ into ‘tools’ – that is, as opportunities in the service of needs and projects. What worries Heidegger is that ‘environmentality’, that nested sequence of relationships and dependencies in which one tool is ‘ready-to-hand’ for the purpose or function of another, is simply dissolved by the rigorous application of mathematical-logical structure. Heidegger writes,
When space is discovered non-circumspectively by just looking at it, the environmental regions get neutralised to pure dimensions. Places—and indeed the whole circumspectively oriented totality of places belonging to equipment ready-to-hand—get reduced to a multiplicity of positions for random Things.52
With this in mind, the deeper sense in which the central character of Who is homeless can be found in the fact that he is only a temporary visitor in the ‘worldhood’ of each world he visits. His typical rejection of assimilating to any culture – even British culture – is often contrasted with his companions’ ties to place, relationships and, sometimes, family. In ‘An Unearthly Child’, this contrast is strikingly drawn in the Doctor’s decision to leave Earth despite the resistance of Ian and Barbara, while Susan complains about having to leave the referential totality of cultural meaning that she has adopted as her own:
DOCTOR: (taking off his cloak and scarf) You have heard the truth. We are not of this race. We are not of this Earth. We are wanderers in the fourth dimensions of space and time, cut off from our own planet and our own people by aeons and universes that are far beyond the reach of your most advanced sciences.
SUSAN: It’s true. Every word of it’s true. You don’t know what you’ve done coming in here. Grandfather, let them go now. Don’t you see they don’t believe us? They can’t do us any harm. I know these Earth people better than you. Their minds reject things they don’t understand.53
The trope of alienation from the worldhood of the world in Doctor Who appears everywhere, from Hartnell’s portrayal of the Doctor as the alienated, eccentric professor, to the inability of Peter Davison’s younger and more emotive Doctor to relate to his younger, more emotive companions. The phenomenon can also be used to comic effect, as Matt Smith’s eleventh Doctor demonstrates when he finds himself unable to stomach even the blandest of human foods (‘The Eleventh Hour’, 2010) and when he awkwardly pecks those he meets on either cheek with ‘Gallic air kisses’, asking, ‘That’s how we greet each other nowadays, isn’t it?’ (‘The Lodger’, 2010).
Before us, then, are two uncanny aspects of the Doctor’s homeless existence. The open-ended nature of his travels, unburdened by any particular puzzle at the heart of the programme to which everything else must lead is one of these. The other is his conscious distancing of himself from even the closest of his travelling companions. These components of Doctor Who are just as important to its mutable formula as are the pro-science Doctor and the hypertechnological TARDIS itself. Together with the critical, inquiring edge that this renegade Time Lord cultivates, itself the heritage of science fiction’s commitment to the values of the Enlightenment and the rationalistic spirit of the positivists, these strands gesture towards some of the more unique charms of wandering in the Fourth Dimension.