Talk about the Doctor’s ethics is complicated by his inhumanly archaic nature. While there had been occasional allusions to the Doctor’s astonishing longevity in the 1960s, it was Jon Pertwee’s Doctor who claimed, ‘I’m beginning to lose confidence for the first time in my life – and that covers several thousand years.’ On the other hand, extreme maturity seems to understandably bring greater confidence – Sylvester McCoy’s Doctor says that it’s ‘easy’ to rewire a piece of alien machinery ‘when you’ve had nine hundred years’ experience’. But what often appeared as a joke in classic Doctor Who has become an ethical leitmotif of the new iteration of the show – the Doctor’s age gives him a unique, distinctively alien perspective on matters of life and death.
The Doctor’s role as the ultimate outsider complicates the evaluation of his moral choices. Gary Gillatt, a cultural historian of Doctor Who notes, ‘In many ways, the Doctor is defined by our distance from him […] we are rarely given access to his thought-processes or motivations, which in turn only adds to the character’s enigmatic appeal.’1 To anchor its claims of justifying and explaining moral life, ethics must anchor its claims ‘anthropologically’ by making reference to humans as paradigmatic moral agents, with emotional, cognitive or logical abilities that make possible the apparently non-natural phenomena of duty, obligation, conscience and character. It may seem frivolous or highly academic to ask after the ethics of fictive characters; after all, only the creators’ imagination (and standards of audience plausibility), and not anthropological facts, constrain the development of the characters. But well-developed fictional characters who have passed through the hands of a diversity of writers, critics, editors, authors, interpreters, producers or directors can lay a certain claim to having a widely acknowledged ‘essence’ to them, and they may serve as cases against which we can test our moral intuitions.
A familiar theme of the programme since 2005 has been the way that the consequences of the Doctor’s actions affect both him and those he defends as they resound through time. The Doctor’s character and values do develop, and so does the possibility for developing dramatic tensions between the slightly different ethical perspectives of his various incarnations. This was a tension that began to be seriously developed after the regeneration from fifth to sixth Doctor in ‘The Twin Dilemma’ and that Terrance Dicks exploits in the first novel in the BBC eighth Doctor range, The Eight Doctors. McGann’s version of the Time Lord, the latest at that point, is swept forward through his own personal timeline, meeting his first two selves only to confront his third incarnation, who has just defeated the Master in a post-’Sea Devils’ tussle and who still possesses the latter’s Tissue Compression Eliminator weapon. The Third Doctor, stranded on Earth, is ‘toying with’ the Eliminator while ‘looking longingly’ at his future self’s fully functioning TARDIS:
‘I know you won’t do it,’ said the [eighth] Doctor. ‘Because you didn’t …’
Even as he spoke the Doctor realised what he said wasn’t necessarily true. By his very presence he was already altering time. Who knew how much more things might change, perhaps for the worse?
The Third Doctor picked up the doubt in his mind and smiled grimly. ‘Exactly! Now you’re here, anything can happen!’2
For these temporal aspects of one person to conflict, it seems as though the Doctor must also pass through phases of moral development. Through reflecting on the moral development of fictional characters, we can often profitably recall our own, similar experiences. In many ways, the Doctor resembles the questing hero of Joseph Campbell’s interpretations of ancient mythology.3 Like this hero, the Doctor’s decisions and motivations can, in a number of important ways, be ‘mapped’ onto features of our own common moral lives, rendering a fictive character as an extended set of metaphors. His actions and their consequences become hypothetical occasions for the audience to engage in what John Dewey called ‘dramatic rehearsal of possibilities’. In the end, of course, anything meaningful we can say about Gallifreyan ethics will have to be modelled on our own empirical knowledge of the human moral condition and on our own moral intuitions.
Although it is impossible to know how long the third Doctor’s exile on Earth lasted in ‘continuity years’, his adventures from 1970–4 put him in close contact with our own mad species during the show’s history.4 The decision to ground the cosmic traveller on Earth in the near future and to give him backup in the form of the paramilitary intelligence organisation UNIT was made by producer Peter Bryant and script editor Derrick Sherwin in the last year of Troughton’s time as the Doctor. This portended a major revolution for the show’s storytelling, especially given the BBC’s recent, exciting shift to colour broadcasting. The creation of the framework for the Doctor’s ‘UNIT years’ was the first of three sea changes for the show, each of which was created as a response to mounting external pressure from audiences whose film-going and telly-watching activities redefined what the expectations were for science fiction and fantasy. Doctor Who scholars Howe, Stammers and Walker explain:
As the sixth season of Doctor Who progressed, viewers appeared to forgo Doctor Who, preferring the regional ITV fare of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Land of the Giants, Tarzan, and an imported series from Australia, Woodbinda, Animal Doctor. At the end of the sixth season, individual episodes of The Space Pirates and the ambitious ten-part The War Games received the lowest ratings so far in Doctor Who’s history, with the final story not even managing on average to break the five million mark, and Episode 8 managing only 3.5 million, making it the lowest-rated episode to date.5
A keener edge was needed, Sherwin and Bryant agreed, to infuse potent action and alien invasions with Cold War adult themes popular at the time, such as the international spy industry and the arms race.
Pertwee’s first series as the Doctor is marked, not only by the new plot pivots of character development and explicitly political scripts, but by a fresh foregrounding of the ethical. The plots of three 1970, seven-part stories, ‘Doctor Who and the Silurians’, ‘The Ambassadors of Death’ and ‘Inferno’, are similar in that each lays blame for a catastrophe – whether the careless development of nuclear power, the loss of space exploratory missions, or the infernal end of the world itself – on one or a small group of unscrupulous scientists who care little for the victims of their quest for power. Pertwee’s debut, ‘Spearhead from Space’ (1970), is more of a traditional romp with an alien menace at its middle, but nonetheless it shows us a newfangled Doctor more eager to leave Earth than to help its inhabitants, a character whose first decisive act is to steal stylish clothes for himself from a hospital!6 Although it is not incorrect to say that Pertwee played the role as ‘an implacable ultra-English hero in the Bulldog Drummond mould’,7 his character, chafing under the constraint of being trapped on one world, living in Greenwich Mean Time, and forced into an unlikely alliance with United Nations military intelligence, is problematic. Representing a potential threat to the insular human race, the Doctor’s alien nature as a sword of Damocles is dramatically exploited by the forces of Operation Golden Age in ‘Invasion of the Dinosaurs’ (1974), in which the Doctor’s loyalty to his human allies is questioned not once but twice.
If we set aside appeals to virtue and character for a moment and restrict ourselves to the two dominant, modern wings of reflection about morality, there are two broad paths to take for judging the Doctor’s moral behaviour. Consequentialist views about ethics state that what matter in morality are the consequences of our actions, and these views are marked by our attempt to see that those actions are motivated by the intent to maximise some good. The ‘good’ may be pleasure or happiness for the individual, the group or the community, or indeed some other secular or theological consequence, like glorifying the state or gazing at the City of God. It’s tempting to say that consequentialist ethical attitudes and theories are all united by the slogan, ‘The ends justifies the means’, but the tremendous diversity of views about how ends and means are to be conceived and related proves this slogan is merely a cliché. In contrast, deontological views (from deon, Greek for ‘duty’ or ‘obligation’) claim that moral behaviour is to be judged by how it adheres to a rule or set of rules. Although the best-known deontologist is the Prussian thinker Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), more recently the late John Rawls (1921–2002) and his student Thomas Nagel (1937–) have championed formalist ethical theories that aim to justify moral rules or principles and explain how they are rationally derived. For Nagel, a careful process of thought reveals that there are two types of reasons for acting: personal or subjective ones and timeless and intrinsic reasons that would be reasons for anyone in a similar position to ours. What this implies is that altruistic actions – as examples of objectively morally correct actions – are morally justified by their impersonal nature. Therefore, they transcend place, time, culture and the contingencies of circumstance. While a consequentialist might reason that in many circumstances, making a false promise to others would result in more good than refraining from doing so, Nagel urges us to put ourselves in the position of the person being lied to. The basis for our negative reaction at being lied to, for Nagel, is resentment, and our resentment means that we think that others have a reason not to hurt us in such a way. ‘But if it’s a reason anyone would have not to hurt anyone else in this way, then it’s a reason you have not to hurt someone else in this way (since anyone means everyone).’8 There are at least some principles – whether warning against bringing about some bad consequences or enjoining us to pursue some objective good – that have an impersonal, non-subjective authority, the deontologist claims.
Deontological ethics grow more robust when they incorporate the view that good judgement is key to applying principles to complex situations. After all, no two moral situations can be precisely alike, so the question becomes: what are the morally significant differences between a past and a current scenario? A good judgement requires at least the capacities to assess the weight of relevant facts and the creativity to envision what principle(s) fit the situation, and how they fit. While some situations can be addressed by mechanical application of principles, many of the problems that the Doctor and his companions face are not so simple. In ‘School Reunion’ (2006), the tenth Doctor is presented with a tempting offer from Brother Lassar (Anthony Head) of the Krillitanes. If the Doctor addresses himself to the problem of the Skasis Paradigm, ‘reality will become clay’ in the hands of its solver. ‘Imagine what you could do – think of the civilisations you could save. Perganon, Assinta … your own people, Doctor. Standing tall. The Time Lords … reborn’, Lassar tells him.9
This would be an easier choice for the Doctor if the judgement were merely one of ‘inclination’ or self-interest (to save the Time Lords) as opposed to duty (to stop the evil Krillitanes). This is often how Immanuel Kant’s rule-guided deontology frames moral choices, but it’s not obvious that alliances with evil for the sake of the greater good (like the brief Doctor–Master alliances in ‘Logopolis’ and ‘The End of Time’, Part Two) or that using the creative powers unlocked by the Skasis Paradigm with benevolent intent are absolutely and automatically morally wrong. In fact, it is primarily the complex nature of the moral judgements put upon the Doctor that make it difficult to apply traditional ethical theories like deontology to judge his conduct. Not only are the Doctor’s intentions both complex and usually private, but also they often relate to unique situations in which conventional rules don’t apply.
Similarly, consequentialist views on moral justification are presented with difficulties by the Doctor’s unique relationship to time. There is already an ambiguity in consequentialism about the grounds on which our conduct should be judged: should it be based on our intention to bring about the greatest balance of happiness or pleasure? Or on the good or bad consequences that our actions do in fact produce? So, in ‘Attack of the Cybermen’, the sixth Doctor’s involvement on Telos undoubtedly produces the best results for everyone on Earth when the Cybermen are robbed of the power of time travel and Halley’s Comet is deflected from crashing into the Earth in 1986. But both the Doctor’s intention to bring about these results, and his morose reflection on the death of the mercenary Lytton (Maurice Colbourne), indicate that he recognises an important discrepancy between intent and actual consequences.
The case of a time traveller with the potential for changing a historically finished chain of consequences or diverting future trains of repercussions provides additional difficulties (‘The Fires of Pompeii’, 2008). Assessing the decisions or administering praise and blame in terms of consequences assumes a linear, cause-and-effect notion of how the universe works. But Doctor Who often demonstrates that thinking in terms of linear cause and effect is merely a convenient fiction – for example, in the cases of the TARDIS jumping a time dimension in ‘The Space Museum’ (1965), or the insight into our timeline provided by alternate universes of ‘Inferno’ (1970), ‘Rise of the Cybermen’ (2006) and the Master’s Paradox Machine in ‘The Sound of Drums’. The conundrums resulting from trying to apply consequentialist or deontological tests arise whenever we attempt to make assessments of whether our hero (were he a real person) is generally blameworthy or praiseworthy. This is one of the reasons the original run of the programme was less explicitly moralistic than Star Trek or even The Twilight Zone. In many respects, the Doctor’s morality is an ‘ethics of ambiguity’; I will try to explain this view and its attractions in the rest of this chapter.
Aside from deontology and consequentialism, there is another approach that better captures the ethos (from the same Greek root as ethical) of Doctor Who as a whole, and capitalises on the humanistic dimension of the Doctor’s character that we explored in the first chapter. Simone de Beauvoir sees the very possibility of ethics as entrenched in the ambiguities of human nature, and the Doctor’s character shares many of these ambiguities. De Beauvoir’s existentialist ethic is thoroughly modernist, tempered by crises such as war and depression and reflecting a fundamental intellectual insecurity about the difference between good and bad and how these relate to human nature. She is suspicious of reducing the richness of ethical life to a moral code, and calls rigid adherence to moral theories the attribute of the ‘serious man’, who ‘take[s] refuge in the ready-made values of the serious world’, transforming conventional moral views into unconditioned values.10 ‘Ambiguity’ typically refers to the fact that a sentence can have more than one literal meaning, but de Beauvoir extends its use to assert the truth of multiple meaningful self-images for persons, claiming that there is no single ground in human nature making morality possible and necessary. ‘Ambiguity signals the tension between seemingly opposing experiences of the self as both a free subject and an object for others.’11 We face multiple and competing self-descriptions, equally valid and equally coherent: we take on roles that are incommensurable with each other; we are free, yet bound by commitments and by our ‘facticity’, or the theories that describe and delimit us. We are both body and mind, both frail and capable of transcending our mundane nature; it is these tensions between a person’s conflicting natures that make ethics possible and necessary. The roots of existentialist ethics, though, spring from the fertile ground of the European Enlightenment and the reaction to it in the form of the Romantic movement. In particular, we can look to the Romantic development – in art, poetry and other forms of culture – of the aesthetic and moral values of the sublime and the diversity and power of sensibility. These two ideas can work well together – Romantic sensibility urging us to pay attention to the evidence of the sense and emotions and to refrain from over-intellectualising life, with sublimity, or surpassing and transcending boundaries, achieving new heights, as the ideal goal of life. There is also a dramatic tension between them, a tension that sheds light on the major transformation of Doctor Who germane to its ethics, the genesis of which was in 1996.
This is because bold decisions were made in re-imagining Doctor Who in the years prior to 1996’s Doctor Who: The Movie, and later for the new series begun in 2005. An explicit stress was to be laid on the emotions and the relationship dynamics between characters, especially between Doctor and companions, and these changes seemed justified in light of a general mainstreaming of SF characterisation reinforced in popular programmes such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Heroes and Lost. Kim Newman detects a seismic shift starting with the design of the character of the eighth Doctor, who is ‘impulsive, open (if the heart is the centre of feeling, this would explain why [Paul] McGann has emotion enough for two), eager to share knowledge even if he knows he should keep it to himself’.12 Lance Parkin could not have helped contrasting McGann’s characterisation with the calculating, always-one-step-ahead seventh Doctor when he wrote, ‘The Eighth Doctor […] lacks arrogance, instead demonstrating child-like qualities of wonder and boundless energy. Everything is done in earnest, with a passion. He fixes on things and is capable of brilliant improvisation.’13 Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant have also injected significantly more pathos into the role since 2005 as well as multiplying the number of times the Doctor has kissed (or been kissed by) companions and other fellow travellers – an ironic turn given the negative fan reaction to the eighth Doctor’s snogging with Grace Holloway in the TV movie.
The portrayal of the ethically ambiguous and the passionate in Doctor Who converges with the ideals of Romanticism, less a philosophical system than a temperament and worldview born in Britain and Germany out of the collapse of the Enlightenment adulation of reason. Its spark was the French Revolution, in many ways the logical outcome of agitations of the French Enlightenment thinkers such as Denis Diderot and Voltaire. The overthrow of the French regime inflamed the continent, conveying an ‘intoxicating sense that now everything was possible’, and led many intellectuals to believe that human nature, rather than being doomed to sin and redemption, was actually perfectible.14 The dark side of the Enlightenment, though, was found in the revolution ‘eating its own children’ in terms of the irrationality and excess of its 1793–4 Reign of Terror (which, as we know, the first Doctor was helpless to prevent). The Marquis de Condorcet, one advocate of the perfectibility of man and ironically a victim of the Terror himself, nonetheless held out hope for the species in general in his Outline of the Progress of the Human Spirit, crying, ‘May I live! for after this there is nothing which I am not daring enough to hope.’15 In a parallel construction to this movement in history, Doctor Who has the Doctor’s character evolve from his initial ‘enlightened’ alienation from sterile Gallifreyan society towards more positive relationships with his (mostly) human companions, to whom he frequently preaches perfectibility through diverse experiences and moral development. In post-2005 Doctor Who, blatantly Romanticist themes emerge from the utter destruction of Gallifrey. It is notable that the very first time we see the Doctor openly weep is in ‘The End of the World’ when Jabe confronts him about the destruction of the Time Lords; similarly, a poignant welcome to a New Year’s dinner, at the end of 2011’s ‘The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe’, coaxes a rare tear from the eleventh Doctor when Amy and Rory Williams tell him that they always set a place for him.
If a single ideal could be found to represent Romanticist ethics, it would have to be an ideal that has indefinite potential for richness and depth. This ideal is found in the quest for what it means to become more fully human. In face of the Reign of Terror and the collapse of the goal of a society organised by principles of reason, historian of ethics Warren Ashby tells us,
there arose the ideal and reality of the individual in his or her uniqueness, with potential and realised richness and depth […] Each of these individuals broke previous rational limits and discovered new ways of feeling and thinking. In each there emerged new perceptions of what life essentially was and might be.16
The Romantics share with later existentialists the idea that human nature is not a given, but that its shaping is essentially in the hands of each person as expressive and free. So begins a fascination with the quality of experience as well as with the social conditions that made this quality better or worse.
The problem with Romanticism – the core ‘philosophy’ of which emerges from the literary and historical examination of poets and writers such as Wordsworth, Blake, Keats, the Shelleys, Byron, and especially Coleridge – is that (like the existentialists) it presents us with metaphors, images and narratives rather than theories. Nonetheless, a theory does not need to be explicitly held by those to whom it is attributed in order to do work for future generations. As I mentioned earlier, the post-Enlightenment focus on the intoxicating power of human sensibility and the sublime potential of experience are enough to begin framing a Romantic theory of the good life. The sublime, on this view, is aesthetic code for the ‘transcendent’, or whatever falls beyond or above the normal range of human knowledge or experience. While Romantics like Wordsworth and Byron would hearken back to Milton as the master of transcendent imagery, the Doctor seems to have the view that humans, at their best, are diligent pursuers of the sublime. While the fourth Doctor lauds the cryogenically frozen denizens of ‘The Ark in Space’ (1974) as indomitably ‘ready to outsit eternity’, the eighth chuckles that we are ‘always finding patterns in things that aren’t there’.
These two sides of the Romantic, his commitment as well as his ‘starry eyes’, are both equally important. The characteristic ‘longing’ of the Romantic was not for any particular experience, but for the ‘infinite’ itself, ‘a feeling and a yearning that had to be realised through finite, small things’.17 Wordsworth’s 1805 poem The Prelude rejects an ideal of setting moderate and piecemeal goals, finding infinite longings intrinsic to the human spirit:
Our destiny, our being’s heart and home,
Is with infinitude, and only there;
With hope it is, hope that can never die,
Effort, and expectation, and desire,
And something evermore about to be.18
It is by exploring our feelings about the experience in question, as well as focusing on the indefinite and ambiguous qualities of the experience, that we begin to catch a fleeting glimpse of the infinite. Romantics like poet Percy Bysshe Shelley would disagree with traditional moral philosophers who hold that principled appeals to reason or consequences are enough to tell us how to live a flourishing life. Instead, as Shelley declares in his poem The Sensitive Plant:
For love, and beauty, and delight,
There is no death or change: their might
Exceeds our organs, which endure
No light, being themselves obscure.19
The human faculty of imagination is underappreciated, Shelley thinks. ‘Reason is the enumeration of quantities already known’, he writes, ‘[while] imagination is the perception of the value of those qualities […] Reason is to Imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance.’20 It is clear that this ideal is operative in Doctor Who’s more subtle characterisations. That is, it is more work for the audience of Doctor Who to have to look carefully at a character or a race and to be willing to revise judgements about them. American audiences are likely to have a different attitude towards Captain Jack’s open bisexuality than British ones, for instance, and sensitively fabricated ‘monsters’ like Malcolm Hulke’s Silurians may require real labour from audiences in order to make a sound moral judgement about them. The attitude common to both existentialism and Romanticism – in the face of the limitations of our all-too-human perspective – is a stance of openness to surprise in face of the unique experiences of others.
The Doctor-as-Romantic exemplifies this attitude perfectly, and it is when he wears it on his sleeve that he provides the most penetrating example of how to think about the worth of life for the rest of us. In his connection with vast and alien cosmic forces, the Doctor often pronounces how different he is from his (mostly) human companions: ‘I’m a Time Lord […] I walk in eternity’ (‘Pyramids of Mars’); ‘The ground beneath our feet is spinning at a thousand miles an hour, and the entire planet is hurtling around the Sun at sixty-seven thousand miles an hour, and I can feel it’ (‘Rose’, 2005). What is beyond the limits of current knowledge for humanity is the Doctor’s normality, and what he takes as the sublime – the Eye of Orion or the Fifteenth Broken Moon of the Medusa Cascade – often surpasses his travelling companions’ ability to take in. Nonetheless, the Doctor’s challenge to have companions fully engage their sensibilities on their shared travels is a reflection of the rehabilitation of the power of sense experience that began in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with Michel Montaigne’s essays and John Locke’s epistemology and that flourished with the Romantics. Works such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile (1762) led readers to question the social status quo while at the same time leading them into the ‘labryinths of human consciousness’, as Jane Stabler writes:
Goethe’s hero [Werther] and Rousseau’s natural man question the ties which bind individuals into civil society and assert a natural democracy of feeling. Spontaneous responses such as sighing, blushing, weeping, and fainting were revered as physical embodiments of this innate moral sense […] While virtuous sensitivity was often perceived as a feminine trait, [Samuel] Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison (1753–4), Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), and [Henry] MacKenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771) all portrayed male characters vibrating with sympathetic impulses.21
Much as the Doctor’s sympathies function as the mainspring for his cosmic rescue operations, the ‘Sensibility Movement’, beginning in the late eighteenth century, ‘played a crucial role in humanitarian movements on behalf of the poor, on behalf of native peoples around the globe, as well as on behalf of the abolition of slavery’.22 To play this role, Romantics had to first develop a new ‘cosmopolitanism of the senses’, in which each human is seen as united with every other through the universality not of our rational faculties, but of our feelings. ‘Courts of law, theatre, church, court, government, public assemblies, academies, colleges etc. are as it were the specialised inner organs of the mystical individual, the state’, wrote the epigrammatic critic Novalis.23 With its fresh outlook on communities as organic wholes, as fragmentary societies united through ideal identities, Romanticism would also provide a framing ideology for nationalism in the nineteenth century and, ironically, for the individual-swallowing European fascism and totalitarianism of the twentieth. One of the great failings of Romanticism’s weakening of the power of rational criticism (at which Enlightenment philosophes had so excelled) is the opening that it provides for the strong to exploit the sensitive, whether ideologically or through pure force. In Wordsworth’s poetry for example,
there was a deep tension between attitude and conceit, for the essence of the right attitude was ‘wise passiveness’, resignation in the face of human transience and receptivity toward nature’s eternal Being, while the conceit ultimately meant poetry’s triumph over fate. Poetry, in a word, could accomplish what social arrangements could not.24
The Doctor does not often engage in this ‘wise passiveness’ (one notable exception being the ninth Doctor’s repeated assertion that ‘Everything has its time and everything dies’) but Doctor Who in the twenty-first century often emphasises two Wordsworthian themes – the inevitability of tragedy and the salvific power of human feeling and empathy in the face of the failures of even our most assured projects and plans.
It should be noted that the Doctor’s many peccadilloes – his anachronistic and sometimes tasteless dress style being only the most prominent of these – have surprisingly exceptional status within the ‘philosophy’ of Romanticism as well. Romantic poetry – especially pastoral works – frequently exercises the imagination by revealing new dimensions of seemingly inconsequential things. Part of the attraction of the Doctor’s eccentricity is how he immerses himself in ‘finite small things’, like a cup of tea, flowers, exotic hats, home cooking (‘Battlefield’, 1989) and, of course, little shops. ‘For some people, small, beautiful events are what life is all about!’ the fifth Doctor reminds us in ‘Earthshock’. In some respects, the discovery of the Romantics that attentive and focused sensibilities point to transcendent natures of even ordinary things presaged the development of continental phenomenology that we examined briefly in the first chapter.
The American novelist James Baldwin observed that ‘nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom’.25 In our examination of the Doctor’s adventures in time and space, we have spent little time on the notion of freedom, a theme of exceptional significance in both Romanticism and existentialism. The TARDIS is emblematic of this freedom: from the very first episode in 1963, we see that the Doctor’s time and space machine gives him limitless opportunities to travel everywhere and everywhen – a freedom most of us would love to possess.26 Freedom may be fathomed either in terms of what it is an escape from, or as an enhancement of powers to decide or accomplish, or both. In the Doctor’s case, the significant obstacle to the freedom afforded by the TARDIS (at least in his first three incarnations) is his spotty knowledge of how to work his ship. While companion Jamie McCrimmon makes a running joke of the second Doctor’s inability to pilot the craft accurately, the knowledge of ‘time travel law’ is actively and coercively suppressed from the third Doctor’s mind by the Time Lords during his exile on Earth.
This theme of liberty as freedom from obstacles and from coercion sits well with certain strains of Enlightenment thought inspired by the work of Sir Francis Bacon, who sees ‘the dignity of man in his assuming control of an objectified universe through instrumental reason’.27 Kant would later hint in his work that liberty implied for us the possibility of a spontaneous sort of action – something sublime that is reducible to neither habit nor behaviour, but that is, rather, a ‘“something” that is left over when I have excluded from the determining grounds of my will everything belonging to the world of sense’.28 According to Kant, all praiseworthy moral acts are unquestionably of this stripe, since their source is reason. Quite unfortunately, however, Kant’s account leaves us without a naturalistic framework on which to hang our explanations of freedom and morality; in short, it sunders freedom and nature in order to protect the purity of both.
However, there is also a discourse that runs through Romantic thought claiming this picture of human dignity is achieved only through an artificial and ultimately harmful split in thinking between nature and freedom. What Charles Taylor calls the ‘expressivist turn’ begins with a very un-Enlightenment thought that is well expressed by Friedrich Schiller, who along with Goethe is a patron saint of German letters. ‘Reason does indeed demand unity; but Nature demands multiplicity; and both these kinds of law make their claim upon man’, Schiller writes. ‘Hence it will always argue a still defective education if the moral character is able to assert itself only by sacrificing the natural.’29 For Schiller, as for the poet Hölderlin and philosopher G.W.F. Hegel after him, if there were to be no way to reconcile the opposite sides of the human condition – freedom and duty on the one hand and nature, feeling and desire on the other – then we would have to content ourselves with the possibility of a permanent ‘underclass’ of the ignorant and incapable. This is the undesirable outcome when ‘not merely individuals, but whole classes of men, [are] developing but one part of their potentialities, while [in] the rest, as in stunted growths, only vestigial traces remain’.30 It is an unacceptable cost, even if we accept the dualistic basis for the struggle between freedom and nature.
Furthermore, Schiller seizes on an important point when he claims that ‘freedom’ as ‘freedom from obstacles’ is an oversimplified sense of the concept. He claims:
Civilisation, far from setting us free, in fact creates some new need with every new power it develops in us. The fetters of the physical tighten ever more alarmingly, so that fear of losing what we have stifles even the most burning impulse toward improvement, and the maxim of passive obedience passes for the supreme wisdom of life. Thus do we see the spirit of the age wavering between perversity and brutality, between unnaturalness and mere nature, between superstition and moral unbelief; and it is only through an equilibrium of evils that it is sometimes kept within bounds.31
We should read Schiller here as suggesting that ethics properly balances a view of the freedom and rights of the individual with empirical theories of the human good to find a way to structure society to maximise both. That is, ethics leads towards the perfectibility of individuals and the species.
When we consider the importance of having both the opportunity and the audience to express one’s own unique solution to Schiller’s dilemma of morality versus nature, we find the link between the Romantics and the twentieth-century existentialists. Perhaps the best known of these latter, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80), has pointed out that freedom not only means having choices between a range of options for acting, but also refers to a positive ability to make one’s own choices. Sartre’s widening of the concept of freedom calls attention to the ways in which a traditional moral sense constricts available notions of what ‘ethics’ is all about: are we simply to avoid forbidden actions, as rule systems such as the ancient Egyptian code of Ma’at or the Ten Commandments require? But then, what should we do? The content of a flourishing life is not something gleaned from a set of rules, even if one concedes that it must work within it. Must we focus on performing our absolute duties, as Kant recommends? This ignores the possibility that we might have insoluble conflicts of duties, but also fails to deal with the possibility that we might be simultaneously commanded to both do and refrain from doing an action – surely a deep problem!32 Are we simply to act in favour of the greatest pleasure for the greatest number, as hedonistic consequentialists would have it? This exposes us to the possibility that the happiness of the many may consistently depend upon the oppression of the few, a situation that the Doctor encounters far too often as evidenced by ‘The Mutants’ (1972), ‘The Sun Makers’, ‘The Happiness Patrol’ (1988), ‘The Rebel Flesh’/‘The Almost People’ and many other adventures. Rejecting the very idea that moral theory might be helpful in grappling with our own ‘dreadful freedom’, Sartre instead offers a compelling story of a young French student who came to him for advice during World War II:
The boy was faced with the choice of leaving for England and joining the Free French Forces—that is, leaving his mother behind—or remaining with his mother and helping her to carry on. He was fully aware that the woman lived only for him and that his going-off—and perhaps his death—would plunge her into despair. He was also aware that every act that he did for his mother’s sake was a sure thing, in the sense that it was helping her to carry on, whereas every effort he made toward going off and fighting was an uncertain move which might run aground and prove completely useless.33
What choice did Sartre advise his troubled student to make? The answer may be surprising; to understand it, we must make a short hop in the TARDIS to other existentialist views. Without seeming obtuse, I want to explain these views through answering what could be the most decisive question in Doctor Who (besides, of course, ‘Who is the Doctor?’), namely, ‘Why did the Doctor leave Gallifrey?’
More than forty years after the show’s première, we still know little about the Doctor’s reasons for his lifestyle choice of ‘wandering through space and time in a rackety old TARDIS’ (‘The Five Doctors’). At first, both the Doctor and his granddaughter Susan speak longingly of one day returning to their unnamed homeworld, from which they have been exiled. The Doctor’s confessed inability to control the TARDIS suggests that he left home in less than ideal circumstances. In this role, the Doctor clearly represents a forlorn individual like Sartre’s student: both must face up to both the opportunities and the dreadful responsibilities of being free.
But things are not so clear! In ‘The War Games’, the second Doctor is seized by the Time Lords and put on trial for interference in the course of established history. He claims to his companions that he left Gallifrey voluntarily, because he was bored. What are we to make of the inconsistency of the Doctor’s motives and, indeed, his entire history? Existentialism will weigh in that inconsistency and ambiguity are to be treasured because they are close reminders of our own freedom to revise our identity and our future. Dostoevsky – not a philosopher but nonetheless a keen observer of the complex web of reason and subjectivity – has his ‘underground man’ tell us,
Reason knows only what it has managed to learn (some things, perhaps, it will never learn; this is no consolation, but why not say it anyways?), while human nature acts as an entire whole, with everything that is in it, consciously and unconsciously, and though it lies, still it lives.34
Both Dostoevsky and de Beauvoir, albeit in very different ways, acknowledge that the pursuit of human wholeness requires not only a recognition of the ambiguities of our nature but also our efforts towards ‘impossible possessions’, like Sartre’s injunction about man attempting to be God. All three highlight our struggles towards making ourselves a ‘lack of being’, that is, wresting ourselves from whatever is mechanical and uninflected in our lives in order to continuously reaffirm our freedom.35 Consistency of character, and perhaps even of self-description, is often the casualty of meeting this challenge. And, as James Chapman writes in his cultural history of Doctor Who, ‘The cultural politics and narrative ideologies of Doctor Who […] serve to encourage difference and non-conformity. This is evident […] in the characterisation of the Doctor himself as an eccentric and a social outsider.’36
This is important because existentialists, like the Romantics, put a premium on the unique character of subjective, concrete experience as well as on passion. They take a page from the phenomenologist’s notebook in affirming that an individual consciously ‘renounces its possibilities only by acquiring others. It can freely make itself akin to things, but it cannot be a thing.’37 The self, though, is confronted by an indifferent universe, in which ‘planets come and go. Stars perish. Matter disperses, coalesces, forms into other patterns, other worlds. Nothing can be eternal’, as the sixth Doctor tells Peri in ‘The Trial of a Time Lord’. Like the multiverse of parallel worlds, diminished when the Time Lords’ influence died away, ‘the walls of reality closed, the worlds were sealed. Everything became that bit less kind’ (‘Rise of the Cybermen’). Sartre gives the name ‘facticity’ to the world of social probabilities and physical constants, since its possibilities are similarly ‘sealed’. In such a sphere for human expression, it seems that values must gain their action-guiding form by the fact that they are possibilities, not actualities. If the good preexisted our achieving it, there would be no reason for acting at all. As a result, existentialists see that it is our choices themselves that confer value on a situation. The opposite perspective, embraced by most traditional ethical theories including deontology and consequentialism, is that value is a pre-existing good that we reach for (and hopefully, achieve) when we act correctly.
Against this seemingly common-sense approach, Sartre tells his student to avoid relying on religious doctrines or philosophical theories for advice: not only do they lead us to different outcomes based on arbitrary presuppositions, but they are a way of transferring the ultimate responsibility for value and choice onto something other than us. Never one to claim ideal relationships with his companions, the fifth Doctor is nonetheless a shining example of Sartre’s advice in his treatment of Vislor Turlough, an exiled noble from the advanced planet Trion ‘imprisoned’ at a boy’s school in contemporary England. After a car accident that left him hanging between life and death, Turlough made a bargain with the Black Guardian to assassinate the Time Lord; he makes several attempts, yet it is unlikely that the Doctor is so naïve as to be ignorant of his goal. Perhaps wanting to redeem himself for the death of Adric, another troubled young man under his care, the Doctor supports Turlough in making difficult choices, even when he disagrees with them. When Turlough is rewarded with an enormous diamond at the end of the Eternals’ space-yacht race (‘Enlightenment’, 1983), he refuses the prize and at the same time betrays the Black Guardian, prompting the Doctor to intone, ‘Enlightenment wasn’t the diamond. Enlightenment was the choice.’ Sartre would have approved of the contrast between the Enlightenment crystal (as a metaphor for reified value), and, on the other hand, Turlough’s authentic choice. To accept wholesale the advice of others when making a choice, or to avoid the full responsibility for that choice, is to engage in what Sartre calls ‘bad faith’, the act of denying the aching truth of our freedom. Sartre’s advice is simple but troubling: make some choice and assume responsibility for the choice. Hiding behind pretended absolutes or allowing others to make the decision for us is equally inauthentic – again, bad faith!
A final benefit to examining the Doctor’s exploits through the lens of existentialism is the affirmation that tragedies will always occur. Given the contingency of both human choices and life in general, there lies the constant possibility of the eruption of irremediable evil that destroys the warp and woof of the values and goods we treat as our safety net. Sartre integrates the ethics of tragedy into his ethics by affirming that anyone who genuinely acknowledges her freedom will inevitably feel anguish, forlornness and despair, thus rehearsing key parts of the emotive regimen of the victim of contemporary horrors. Typically not one to wear such negative (if cathartic) emotions on his sleeve, the Doctor has also demonstrated anguish, forlornness and despair, not only in the face of his own actions, but also in the face of those of his companions and allies. It’s difficult, for example, to suppress one’s sympathy for the third Doctor when he motors off into the twilight in Bessie after Jo Grant takes her leave from the role of assistant (‘The Green Death’). While Tom Baker and Peter Davison dramatically underplayed their farewells to companions, the post-Gallifreyan-apocalypse Doctor – especially the Eccleston and Tennant versions – often display ‘cosmic angst’ corresponding to his utter ‘abandonment’ (another Sartrean concept) in being the last of his kind.
Perhaps the best indicator of each Doctor’s success in striving for existential authenticity, however, is how he engages with situations in which his travelling companions avoid or abuse their own freedom. It is with little sense of remorse that the angry ninth Doctor leaves Adam Mitchell behind after only one trip in the TARDIS, during which time Rose’s would-be boyfriend attempted to exploit future technology for gain in his present (‘The Long Game’). It is with more remorse, and perhaps more authenticity, that the tenth Doctor betrays his preference for Rose after Mickey Smith joins the TARDIS crew on a trip to a parallel-universe Earth. Forced to choose between following Rose or Mickey into inevitable danger,
(The Doctor turns from Rose to Mickey. They’re both walking away from him and he doesn’t know which way to turn.)
MICKEY: (gesturing to Rose) Go on then. No choice, is there? You can only chase after one of us, and it’s never gonna be me, is it?
DOCTOR: (to Mickey) Back here in twenty-four hours! (And he runs after Rose. Mickey watches his retreating back.)
MICKEY: (to himself) Yeah. If I haven’t found something better.38
Mickey does find something better, taking over the role of Rickey Smith, the slain parallel-Earth leader of the anti-Cybus forces. That he had to travel so far to find an authentic role to play as the leader of people who genuinely depend upon him (unlike Rose) is perhaps ironic. This subplot of ‘Rise of the Cybermen’/‘The Age of Steel’ underscores the important fact that although the Doctor’s unspoken ethics are based on mediating his own existentialist despair by placing his companions in situations in which they can grow and flourish in ways conducive to the Romantic ethos, he also puts them at extreme risks in doing so. Whether we see this wager as acceptable or not will largely depend on where our own attitude towards tragedy and the importance of human perfectibility falls in our hierarchy of values.
The Doctor’s morality is not algorithmic. Particularly when one incarnation of him is judged against another, he is less predictable than other protagonists of long tenure in SF such as Doc Savage, Isaac Asimov’s detective Lije Bailey, or Captain James T. Kirk of the USS Enterprise. In his existentialist leanings, the Doctor acknowledges both his ultimate freedom and responsibility for his choices by largely rejecting Time Lord culture and defining himself through his wandering and his relationships with those of others species. As a Romantic, the Doctor seeks the infinite in small events – whether in the joy of running through corridors, or in the tragic loss of Shakespeare’s ‘Love’s Labour’s Found’ – and recognises that, since his own path to self-actualisation must be idiosyncratic, everyone else’s must be as well. But in what sense does this lead us to an ethics that is transmissible and action-guiding for the audience?
To reiterate a theme from the beginning of this chapter, we face a problem when we try to gauge the Doctor’s morality, realising that he is different to human moral agents in many significant ways. In ‘The Twin Dilemma’, an episode introducing the sixth incarnation of a Doctor who seemed increasingly at odds with himself, the Doctor reminds us, ‘I’m not only from another culture, but another planet. I am in your terms an alien. I am therefore bound to have different values and customs.’ I would argue that the Doctor resembles a figure in Greek mythology, Prometheus, because both are valorised by our culture in roughly the same ways.39
A Titan, and thus a member of a society that the Greek gods proper overthrew and destroyed, Prometheus challenged the all-powerful, all-knowing Zeus by stealing fire from Olympus to give it to humans to use as they pleased. Zeus (never known for his mercy) chained the most metaphorically important thief in history to a rock, where an eagle ate his liver, over and over again, for eternity. This was a painful process carried out daily, as Prometheus, being immortal, regenerated after each attack. The punishment was not quite eternal, however, as Hercules was later to kill the eagle and free Prometheus from his chains.
The Prometheus myth resonates today as a humanistic reversal of the biblical myth of the Fall: the theft of enlightenment, whether Zeus’s fire or the fruit of the tree of knowledge, may be seen as merely a temptation to self-destruction. Certainly Rose’s and Donna’s mothers are worried about this as their daughters go off with the Doctor. Besides reinforcing the bonds of a friendship, the invitation to travel in the TARDIS expresses the Doctor’s desire to liberate humans, giving us a degree of control over our identities that is at times delightful, at others dreadful. The gift of fire from a Gallifreyan Prometheus – in the Doctor’s words, ‘a whole galaxy to explore, millions of planets, aeons of time, countless civilisations to meet!’ (‘The War Games’) – is an existentialist allegory for escaping from the provincialism of life on one planet and, further, from the mediocrity of much of contemporary mass culture. It is also a Romantic’s metaphor for cultivating our imagination and creating provocations against bias and narrowness, whether our own or that of others.
These reflections disclose the latent content in discussions of popular culture in philosophical contexts. Fictive scenarios, properly contextualised within the ‘field’ of a programme’s ‘universe’, video-game scenarios or other narrative continuities, provide accessible ways for nearly anyone to challenge dominant paradigms of thinking. The Doctor’s proclivity for seeing his companions and adventures through the lenses of Romanticism and existentialism is itself challenging to the dominant ways of talking about ethics in schools, universities and the professions because, all too often, morality is treated as something distinct from the social, biological and cultural conditions from which it emerges. When we talk about what is valuable, the difference between good versus evil, or what a flourishing life would look like, we’re best aided by not only reflections from popular culture, but also facts from other, non-philosophical disciplines such as anthropology, social psychology, game theory and cognitive science. These bodies of knowledge help put flesh on the all-too-thin bones of ethical rules and standards. They make our exploration of morality concrete. Perhaps this seems to conflict with Doctor Who’s unique, recurring narrative twist of the juxtaposition of the familiar and the otherworldly that stories such as ‘The Mind Robber’ (1968) and ‘The God Complex’ (2011) excel at executing. After all, Jon Pertwee himself was famous for saying that Daleks aren’t scary, but finding a Yeti on your loo in Tooting Beck would be. We shouldn’t overlook the likelihood that such juxtapositions may be hidden in the most unassuming of guises, even in ethical life. The Doctor’s ethics are inspiring to us primarily because they present fictive examples of the all-too-human demand that we assume risk in order to improve ourselves, that we expand the very notion of freedom in the ways in which we act, and that we let ourselves be inspired by the surprising and the novel.