Two words: Zetetic Elench.
I’ll come back to those words later. If you know what they mean, by all means ruminate on them. If you don’t, have patience, I’ll explain in due time.
All right, first up: this is not a rant about Doctor Who, although there’s going to be a fair bit of discussion about the Doctor and the present season, because it’s a current example of something which is perhaps the most difficult thing in long running series TV: change.
Second, when I say it is the most difficult thing, I mean it. This is fifth degree black belt, Olympic level, hardcore, ninja writing stuff we’re talking about. It is a problem which only happens to shows which are so good they get renewed again and again and again. In other words, you have to be at the top of your game even to get the opportunity to have this problem. Okay? So it’s a problem I sure as hell have never had in real life, and while I am about to grumble about various TV shows – constructively – it should be understood that I do so from a position of supine admiration for the writers on those shows, for the decisions they made and the processes by which they arrived at them, even where I think those choices were ultimately not the best ones. Because I am critiquing, by definition, maybe the top fifty TV writers in the world, and I know that I would probably not make such good choices. I’m a novelist for a bunch of reasons, but one of them is this: I’m much better at it than I was at writing for the screen.
Third: there will be spoilers. Not just of Doctor Who, but of other things. It is not avoidable. All the same, I will try to minimise them.
So, with all that said, let’s roll…
All right. This all started last night, when I watched the penultimate episode of the latest season of Dr Who, and found myself thinking that it was basically depressing. I think of the Doctor as fundamentally happy-go-lucky, because I was raised on the old shows. The new doctor – and he’s been awesome – is actually kinduva headcase. He’s traumatised, he’s a xenocide and a genocide, and he’s a bit scary. Where he used to fib, he now lies. He’s been brought into the world, which is vital – Tom Baker’s Doctor, however much I loved him, was essentially a wandering God, largely an observer who occasionally cheated and put his thumbs on the scales of human life. But the consequence is that he has also acquired some serious baggage. I liked the David Tennant Doctor a lot, but I was a bit startled by quite how many alien civilisations he obliterated. The pattern is familiar in a variety of guises – John Constantine, the Hulk, the Jedi – and goes something like this: an apparently unarmed character espouses peaceful living but has principles on which he won’t compromise. He is called in some way to protect those around him. An enemy appears who has an advantage in numbers and in aggression. The central character warns the enemy to back off – which they don’t, because it’s one dude in a flappy coat versus an army, so why would you? The central character then waits or is busy while the situation deteriorates. The enemy is poised to eat a planet or take someone’s soul. The central character says “I warned you,” or “you leave me no choice,” and steps up a gear. In the case of Constantine, this means that someone gets sent screaming to Hell with their own innards driven through their eyeballs or something equally grotesque. With the Jedi, guardians of peace and justice, it means arms come off. And with the doctor, it means species extinction.
And then he feels just terrible about it.
But he allows it to happen again, and again, and again, and again. He’s starting to come across – particularly in the recent episodes – as an addict. He can’t break the habit. He gets a rise out of it. He’s a smoker, and his gasper is massive retributive violence in the name of saving his friends.
Some of the reasons for this are structural, consequences of earlier decisions in the Doctor’s story. His alone-ness, his sorrow, his regret… those are the consequence of the choices which were made bringing the series back for the Eccleston run. To make him real, the Doctor was made the last of his kind. To give him a sense of depth, he was given pain. He had been forced, by those same inflexible notions of right and wrong, to destroy his own people. But these choices are not impossible to deal with. There are ways for the Doctor to be redeemed and joyful without discounting those old sins. Through cloning or even just reproduction, he could create a new race of Timelords. If that doesn’t appeal, and you happen to have a TARDIS, you can create a new civilisation and drop in on it from time to time to keep it on track. You can share your technology, cautiously, with civilisations you admire. The rule of non-interference is so thoroughly broken at this point you may as well acknowledge it. You can allow the universe to evolve, let your friends become as magical as you are.
And that’s the rub: the decision not to do that is about the fear of changing the format. It’s not internal, it’s external, an editorial decision. And it has consequences inside the world, because it limits the actions of a limitless man. It restricts him to repeating patterns. The repetition starts to look ugly after a while – which is why Grissom had to leave CSI, why Ross started to get quite scary and alarming on Friends, and why Buffy could never leave Sunnydale and started to look like a picture of suburban desperation by the end. The Doctor, despite having changed a lot, has to be determined to keep humanity and the universe in general and his companions in particular in a kind of infancy. There’s been some great writing recently about The Girl Who Waited, and how the older Amy is revealed as something of a genius – for which sin she is erased so that young Amy can go back to being, er, a perfume model. It’s an artificial boundary on the Doctor’s actions, and in justifying it narratively the writing team is throwing him into increasingly starkly ghastly situations and getting him through them, and because they have considerable emotional integrity in the character they’re weaving the consequences into him and the combination is starting – despite everything they can do – to drive him nuts. I think the strategy is wrong, because I think the format could remain mostly unchanged if you allowed the Doctor to let things develop in the universe. You’ve just given him some extra vulnerabilities, and some extra allies. You’ve afforded him the chance to be surprised and even technologically overmatched, so that he’s suddenly relying on the things which define him: his ridiculous savoir faire, his charm, and his bold compassion.
The thing I’ve never seen in any show is the thing I’d most like to see: characters who survive encounters with the uncanny and the alien, and who learn, adapt, and get stronger. It’s something the Doctor seemingly doesn’t approve of at all – ask Harriet Jones. And the thing about that is that she was right. The Who universe is filled with predators. Earth is – partly as a consequence of the Doctor’s presence – permanently under siege. But when she followed Xander Harris’s lead and announced explosively that the planet was tired of being everyone’s buttmonkey, he killed her political career, incidentally depriving himself of the kind of allies who might, just might, allow him the breathing space to negotiate with an alien enemy rather than obliterating it. The message was that Earth didn’t need to grow up and start making its own mistakes or fighting its own battles. It should remain in a state of childish naïvety – an illusory state of grace – because the Doctor preferred it that way. In fact, I think it’s that external barrier again: can’t have Earth reaching towards new technology which might make the Doctor’s last-minute saves less outstanding. I’m not sure it even makes internal sense any more – at one stage, there were Space Spitfires in the RAF in the 40s. Dissolve to the present, and they’ve gone away. It’s not hard to construct a narrative where we lose access to the technology – but every single time? Surely we’d be changed just a little?
Which brings me to the Zetetic Elench.
Iain M Banks proposed in Excession a civilisation whose entire way of being was to rush out into the universe and be changed. And that is what should happen to the Doctor’s companions. It is what he should wish for the whole human race and the Universe: not puppies at his heel, not copies of himself but something amazing which might eventually surpass him. Something of which he could be a part. Because he is the Doctor, and he is – should be – too large to keep a planet in a jar because he likes it the way it is.
And that, I think, is the thing which long-running shows have to find: a way to allow evolution not just of character but of circumstance, of the basic rules of engagement, without losing their touch. And that is scary. But it also why writers do what they do. Because if you can do that, you’ve managed something amazing.
