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omegangrins · 4 years

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A Treatise On the Doctor

I don't know how to start this. Because I think of Peter Capaldi's words when he said that the only thing required to be a Doctor Who fan, is kindness.

I like 13 and think Chibnall is doing his best job writing the show.

So I struggle to write this because I am engaging against that very unkindness in the Doctor Who fandom, and trying very hard not to be angry back. "Allways try to be nice but never fail to be kind." But I've begun to wonder more and more if those who speak so loudly against the show really know what the show itself is about.

Enough of talking about other people though, cause frankly they're only important as set-up for this conversation. And again, I'm working kind.

So here's what you're gonna learn from this lifelong fan (and the best Tl;dr you're gonna get):

1. The Doctor sucks. From the very beginning. People complain about character traits now that have been around as long as the show.

2. Due to the Doctor's suckage, they tend to do more harm than good. (And because of this, most of the Doctor's "friends" along the way have been, well, let's leave it at the air quotes for now cause it's a damn big list of "BOOOO!!!".)

3. All of the showrunners and writers and actors and editors and everyone else has allways knows this and has played it this way.

4. And last but not least, since this is a time travel show. If you wanna know what and why stuff is happening now, look it up. Everything that happened before is allways in play.

5. None of this is bad, and in fact, it makes the show morally grayer. It's about kindness at all costs. Even your own.

A. First things first, the hard thing. The Doctor is not grrrreat. I mean, sure they try, but they fail a lot more often. In Extremis, a majority of those fatality index counts come from people the Doctor failed to save. That's why it's worded so specifically as "cause of death". All the death's caused by the Doctor's very interaction with time and lack of saving those around them. And part of it's not their fault, but more often than not, the Doctor says I can save you, and can't, won't, or chooses not to.

And that would be alright, but it took them over 1000 years to realize they should start letting their companions lead lives outside of theirs so THEY DON'T DIE. A bit too long as someone who claims to be better.

Not to mention how many times the Doctor is dismissive of their companions and the people around them only to use them for their help and just bug off again. If they truly cared and wanted to help, they would stay and listen in between adventures. Their lifespan is near infinite anyway. What's a few extra Earth hours with some friends you made along the way. You know, maybe fix some of the psychological and emotional damage created by encountering things behind a human's original scope of reasoning. But nope, we gotta go adventure more, byyyyeee!!

So when people talk about these qualities in 13 in a negative aspect I have to laugh because I'm not sure if they understand the joke. Cause we're talking about an alien that grew up around a species calling themselves Time Lords. I try not to blame them too much for it. 1 had to learn how to be hospitable to humans and it's been a bit of a slow learning curve ever since.

B. After the Doctor survived the horrors of the Time War and happened upon a human companion they felt worth connecting to, what did they do? They took Rose to watch her planet burn in front of her eyes. Great, first date, amirite?

And that's a little bit of companion damage. Do you know that the Doctor is responsible for the almost complete genocide of the Silurian race across multiple occasions. I am legitimately surprised there are any left after all of the ones the Doctor has killed. Like before, they cause destruction either purposefully or accidentally or simply by force of being there.

Remember before how I said that the Doctor just flies away. Yeah, they leave a lot of problems behind when they do (something that I can see Chibnall is planting the seeds of). If you had a time and space machine and practically unlimited capabilities and you choose to just leave after a situation and not check up on them from time to or see if there are any other underlying crises to be solved. But oh no, "gotta follow that rule of time and keep going even though I stopped in the first place because of how interested I was.". This is why 9 has a great arc about this. He thought he killed all the Daleks. They came back. He thought he'd gotten rid of the Slitheen. They came back. He thought he saved Satellite 5 from aliens. But opsies, they came back. And look! They're Daleks. Which he "finally" got rid of.

The Doctor just bounces around all carefree and without an ounce of care for themselves, their companions or consequences unless there's consequences for themselves or their companions. Then they get indignant.

Is that really kind of the person you want flying around fixing things in time and space? Who knows. But at least they are trying. Most of the time the T.A.R.D.I.S. lands somewhere and the authority figures are the most pretentious bull-headed pigs you can find. To me, I laugh cause it seems like both sides end up getting a taste of their own medicine. Usually with the bull charging to death in a sad glory while the Doctor wiles on metaphorically about not being as good as them.

But again, as a "superior" alien with "advanced" technology and "culture" you'd think they'd just know better already. But that's all part of the character. The Doctor may be in flux, but true change is difficult. The real hero of every story is the other people BESIDES the Doctor.

Cause the title is Doctor *Who* . The Who being half of the title, despite having less letters. It's the constant question of "What and why and who is that crazy person that's trying to help?" Why do you think they keep flying back to Earth? (Besides set construction reasons.) They've grown as attached to us as we have to them. And at this point, a lot of their saving us is guilt and embarrassment at having a hand in our timeline.

This is also the same reason the Doctor dumps companions in a fluff. Baggage. Every time a companion gets too heavy to carry the memories of... off they fly.

Except for 13. She's stayed. To this end, we can see how the Doctor changes. Not on our smaller, human timelines, but on the timeline of a god with way too much power.

D. With that in mind, we go Classic. It's the Who you need to consult if you wish to make any critique on what's happening now. Because how can you know how a part operates inside of a whole without seeing the whole part?

Cause I don't know if you've watched it but it can be rough, and I don't mean in the sense of production value (which admittedly they do a fairly decent job of using what money they had. A problem the BBC plagues to Doctor Who to this day.). The 3rd Doctor shits on every one they call friends constantly and then turns around expecting help. 4 did the same. Then 5 masked that contempt with a plucky face and a cheeky word. But it was still there, bubbling out of 6 and 7 as the inability to suffer fools gladly and using their own righteousness to enact change in their companions. A trait that kept going til an entire war and regeneration was used solving the question of "Doctor Who?" Only for them to try and forget twice more by putting on their pretty grinning faces and running away from it.

And I'm only talking from a companion perspective. Each of the Doctors has enacted their own form of genocide on countless species. Sure, it's to "save humans" but at the end of the day you'd have to ask yourself if we're really worth that blood. And this is all in the Doctor's history. As much as they claim better, they're hands are still gushing red.

The Doctor left Jo because she fell in love. They drove Adric to put their life on the line in order to feel adequate. The entirety of the Silurian race has been wiped out fivefold under their watch, with one time by their hand itself. Same for several other singular and unique species you won't be able to find elsewhere in the universe. 7 used time travel to enact a personality change in Ace while simultaneously using her as a pawn in an interdimensional war. The Time War itself. Sure it got erased but the Doctor still did those things ("War" Doctor or whatever nonsense titles they feel necessary to delude themselves). The entirety of Amy's childhood was destroyed by their presence, and Rory got erased. Twice! Sarah Kingdom. We know the list. Hell, the Doctor whisked Barbara and Ian away because they wanted to teach the snobby humans some lessons.

They may have a time machine, but we have the bill of their actions. This is where 13 excels. Because they're trying to be better than themselves. They've learnt the lessons of all those years traveling and the failures they wish they could reverse but don't as a way of keeping a scoreboard of pain. It's not perfect by any means, but look at 12 needing cue cards to understand and react to human grief under duress. They've come a helluva long way. After 50 years, I'm inclined to believe better. After all, it's what the Doctor would want.

E. You know how people like the ASOIAF series because it offers up morally complex characters existing in a morally complex world where black and white are harder to define than grey? Have you ever thought of Doctor Who as the same? Strip past the fairytale and adventure and "wibbly wobbly timey wimeyness and it's just people reacting to situations. We're just harder on the Doctor because they're hard on us. You could go round and round on who's the bigger killer, but at the end of the day Time Lords and humans fight and feel about the same things. It's allways been a joke to pretend otherwise.

That's why I love the Timeless Child. Not for making the Doctor anymore special but for saying that even despite having all of their specialness ripped away and repurposed to create a lie of a society then having the memory wiped of said event, the Doctor broke out of their mold, stole a TARDIS and told the Time Lords to fuck off. That's not a Captain America/Superman hero. That's Batman in space with a society of Lex Luthor's. Gotham and Gallifrey. The Doctor saw what they were a part of and broke free, without even knowing the more horrifying truth. Cause it's the thing I see many fans missing because they're so preocuppied with the Doctor being special. The thing that made the Doctor different was their ability to know the difference and walk away to find better. Now, the Doctor has a reason to go back and find out why they never stopped running.

The Time Lords might be the greatest monsters in the universe. It is in the name. "Lords". Those who would lord over us and impose their will with a banthium fist.

And this is a children's show.

C the thing is, the people who made and make this show all collectively rail against one thing: Hate. Kindness is the way of Doctor's. Even if they're sawing off your leg, it's to do the kindness of saving your life. This is because the people who make this (United Kingdomers) have seen centuries of war and conflict and oppression enacted by their own country in the name of progress. And they want to see it no more. Look no further than any of the Doctor's adventures with UNIT. Allways advocating for peace and being ignored for the comfortable war-cry. It's why it's hard to blame the Doctor when we do very similar and often worse (though we don't have time travel.... yet). The creators of this show know better, see better, and wrote better, to know that the powers that be nipped would nip their creations and sanitize them. So they wrote their messages so strong that you can feel them from the future. They're powerfull enough that even across eras they have all collectively moved me to write this.

That's another point I have to laugh at people saying Doctor Who has never been in your face about progressive politics. The Green Death. Survival. Trial of a Timelord (Yes, all of it. Sit down and power through.) The Happiness Patrol is one of my all time favorite episodes for going there in this regard. People may poo poo but history has its' eyes on you. Doctor Who loves taking potshots at the issues of the day. As long as you don't make the aliens black of course. Make them all the colors of the rainbow but never make them black. That'd be too on the nose (That's something they used to say back in the day! Crazy how far we've come).

So bravoa to Chibnall for continuing the legacy of Doctor Who. From where I'm standing, he's not doing anything different than any other showrunner before him. Cause if you want to argue canon, you at least have to know what created it. This show owes what it is to those Classic eras. And if you think Chibnall is shitting on those years and your childhood.... well, then why did you read this whole thing?

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