butterfly | Doctor Who: Defining Life (Reply)

"Pain and loss - they define us as much as happiness or love."*

In the second season, we got to see the Doctor happy and in love and joyous. There were hints of darkness there, but they were kept at bay by the presence of Rose.

This season really feels like the other side of the coin -- we have moments of happiness and love, but the brunt of the emotional impact is about pain and loss. The pendulum swings -- Rose taught him how to be happy again, but the loss of her reminded him of grief. And, in several individual episodes, we get that same story on a smaller scale. The pendulum swings and life goes on -- from love to loss and back again.

They're telling a story about a particular man -- a wonderful and terrible man, who brings death in his wake. They're defining him for us. The New Who is RTD's character manifesto for the Doctor. It's about taking apart the pieces and examining them to see how it all works, to see how the Doctor works.

I mean, that's the question, isn't it? The question that gets asked, over and over. "What sort of man are you?" It's the title of the show -- Doctor Who?

It's the perpetual question -- what sort of person lives this kind of life? What sort of man is capable of making the kind of choices that the Doctor must make? Who is he? What does he stand for? What does he believe in and hope for and why does he keep coming back to us... to humans and to Earth. What makes us so special, when we should be so small?

That's the question that Joan puts to the Doctor. What kind of man is he? He hid from the Family and brought death to a small town. He risked the murder of an unknown number of people because he was (rightly) afraid of his own ability to punish four. He's not human. He's not safe. And, though he cares about humanity, he doesn't really understand it. It's as alien to him as he is to us.

He's the Doctor.

"He's like fire and ice and rage. He's like the night and the storm in the heart of a sun. He's ancient and forever. He burns at the centre of time and he can see the turn of the universe. And... he's wonderful."

And it's not enough. It's too much. It terrifies him. It takes Joan, holding his hand and giving small, quiet, selfless words ("I had hoped... but my hopes aren't important.") to make him realize what sort of man he has to be. And, god, that reminded me of him with Rose. Both of them, Rose and Joan, holding up a mirror to what he's doing and asking him, do you want to be the man that this choice would make you?

"I must look so small to you," Joan says, later. Tiny, Rose-TARDIS calls the Daleks in PotW, when she has the whole of time and space inside her.

The Doctor is so large, so epic. Joan feels so colorless and tiny and human. And she loved John Smith, the sweet teacher who drew her more beautiful than she imagined she could be, the man who was so sweet and nervous with her. She can't imagine this alien ever being that... small.

But we know better -- we know that he's capable of being nervous and sweet and tender. That he can love on the scale of one person as well as the scale of the universe. That he can admire the bravery and power of a single, ordinary man (God, John Smith is very much like Pete Tyler, here -- that ordinary and scared man, sacrificing his future because it's the right thing to do -- and in both cases, they get told a fairy-tale about their future that never happened).

I rewatched Dalek recently and some lines jumped out at me. It was always so clear that the Dalek and the Doctor were meant to be compared, as they do as much in the actual episode ("I know what should happen... exterminate."), but the relationship between the Doctor and Rose and the Dalek and Rose really jumps out to me now.

Both the Dalek and the Doctor nearly kill Rose. Having made the choice and then had her not be killed, they find themselves absolutely incapable of choosing it again. Both of them end up questioning the way that they've always done things, because of her.

"You gave me life. What else have you given me?"

She gives both of them emotions that they haven't felt before, changes them by her very presence, the touch of her hand.

Dalek: "I am the last of the Daleks."
Doctor: "You're not even that. Rose did more than regenerate you. You absorbed her DNA. You're mutating."
Dalek: "Into what?"
Doctor: "Something new."

Like the Dalek, the Doctor strongly resists what Rose is doing to him, how human she begins to make him (and not on purpose, again, just by being Rose and being near him, she changes him).

Back to School Reunion:

Doctor: "If I don't like it, it will stop."
Finch: "Fascinating. Your people were peaceful to the point of indolence. You seem to be something new. Would you declare war on us, Doctor?"

The Dalek was a soldier. The Doctor was a rebel. With their people gone, neither of them can be what they were before. The Dalek couldn't survive the transition to something new. The Doctor has no more law to rebel against and there is anarchy where there used to be order. He can't afford to be a rebel anymore, but he's never wanted to be a god. And yet... there's no one else. Someone has to be the Doctor, Rose says in The Christmas Invasion. And the Doctor is learning that, in the absence of the Time Lords, someone has to be a watchguard against the perversion of time and the theft of life. He has to be judge, jury, and executioner now, because he thinks there's no one else left.

"I'm so old now. I used to have so much mercy."

* Incidentally, this would be why it bothers me when people deny or try to explain away the Doctor's happiness in S2 as a sham. Because that sentence goes the other way around, too -- Happiness and love -- they define us as much as pain or loss. Denying the Doctor's happiness and love feels, to me, like denying a very important part of the definition of the character.

The show has gone to so much trouble to show how happy the Doctor and Rose were together... to dismiss that as the Doctor lying to himself would seem to render his entire character arc pointless.

His character does not make sense to me if he didn't really and truly love Rose. He becomes a stitched-together construct of lies and the wind, with nothing real underneath. And I can't love a character like that.

Which makes me very glad that I don't see that in the Doctor that we're getting on-screen because, as he is, I adore the Doctor.