Why I like Danny Pink
A lot of the last several seasons has been dedicated to the question of what makes a Good Man. Danny Pink, former soldier and current Coal Hill School math teacher - and Clara's series 8 love interest - is a Good Man.
As Love Interest to Primary Companion, Danny invites comparison to the other such - Mickey Smith and Rory Williams. Apart from each playing Betty in a Betty-and-Veronica type dichotomous love triangle, these three gentlemen are nothing alike. One important difference is that Rory and Mickey are both "the boy next door" solid and dependable, the one who's just sort of always been there, and they get left behind when their respective ladies run off to seek Adventure. Clara, by contrast, already has all the adventure she needs, and is actively pursuing the normalcy Danny represents. Clara's relationship with Danny is brand new, and she fails utterly at it. Crucially, Danny is never a foil for the Doctor - he's a foil for Clara. His role in her story is to highlight the fact that she just doesn't belong on this planet anymore. As Clara has gotten better and better at being the Doctor, she has gotten worse and worse at being human. She tries to do the normal job, normal relationship, normal life thing and is just really phenomenally bad at it.
I often see Danny described as "clingy" or "controlling" and...I just can't see it at all. If anything, he's precisely the opposite. Wanting to be in control, and thriving when she is, is one of Clara's defining character traits. Clara is very much the center of her own narrative, but she is not the center of Danny's. It's not that Danny is controlling, it's that he is not himself controlled. (Contrast Amy and Rory, where Amy is absolutely the center of Rory's narrative). But Danny is consistently supportive, and just as his story is never centered on Clara, he never expects her story to be centered on him. He doesn't interpret the Doctor as a rival, although he does recognize that his relationship with Clara is a toxic one. Like, his first reaction isn't "this is who you're seeing instead of me," it's "he's your dad. your space...dad." The Doctor is an explanation for Clara's idiosyncrasies - she's not running of with an alien, she's an alien. It all makes sense now! In the same vein, Danny never tells her not to go with him. Again, quite the opposite. When she decides to leave, he's the one who tells her that she's not done with someone while they can still make her angry. He calls her up on the space train to see if she's having a good time. There's no begrudgement or jealousy there. Danny doesn't care that she's hanging out with the Doctor - he care's that she's lying about it.
Consider their fight from "In the Forest of the Night." Danny gets decently upset with Clara for calling up the Doctor - not because it's the Doctor but because she did it instead of doing her job. And then lied about it. If I were on a field trip trying to manage 30 kids and my co-teacher was skiving off calling one of her buddies to squee about trees I'd be pretty furious too. Painting it as simple jealousy absolves Clara of responsibility and entirely misses the point Danny is trying to make. And the point is this: All Danny ever asks of Clara is her honesty. That is it. The tragedy of their story is that this, for whatever reason, is the one thing she can't give him.
But enough about Clara. This article is not about Clara. One of the things I like about Danny is that he is, at the beginning and end of the day, not about Clara (although he does seem to like her very much), despite the fact that she actually invades his timeline at several points. He's the hero of his own story, and the glimpses we get of it are fascinating. He's an orphan, but apparently at a quite young age he reinvented and renamed himself. He's a soldier, but is neither proud nor ashamed of it. He doesn't have the baggage around the word that the Doctor has (and that Clara has picked up). He's a math teacher, and (unlike Clara) seems to be fairly decent at it, and in particular has an excellent rapport with children. That's actually something all three of them share, in wildly different ways. The Doctor is good with children because he is a child, or at least is operating on child logic most of the time; Clara is good with children because she can come at them like a friend while maintaining her own authority - she's good at setting the narrative; and Danny is good with children because he just seems to get them, and knows how to be the thing that they need. He knows how to rephrase and reframe questions. He paints himself as the authority, maintaining the student-teacher dynamic, putting on more stuffiness than he in fact shows. He's doesn't try to be their friend, he's very much always the teacher - but he's the cool teacher. And all because he seems to genuinely love the kids, problems and all.
The heart of Danny's narrative is the boy he killed in Afghanistan. It's almost the first thing we learn about him - he actually starts crying in class when pressed about it - and it's the last thing he does as well. And it's not treated as "in war these things happen." It was an accident, but that never makes it okay, and Danny takes responsibility for it. He leaves the army, but he's not ashamed of having been a soldier, he is sorry for what he, personally, did. It's just a really well done story - subtle and powerful and wholly believable, not fitting into any of the tropes the other characters keep trying to slot him into. And it's not a burning guilt, but a fundamental sadness that underlies everything that Danny does. It's like his life is already behind him. Everything you need to know about Danny Pink is that, having accidentally killed a child in war, he retires and dedicates the rest of his life to teaching children. He can neither undo nor apologize for what happened, but neither can he forget it, and so he pays it forward as best he can.
It also colors his outlook on life. Danny is unusual among Doctor Who characters in that he has no call to adventure and that's okay. He doesn't want the Doctor Who lifestyle, not because he's a homebody or lacks imagination or thinks it's too dangerous or whatever, but because he's seen too much already. He knows that life is short, and is content to make the most out of what's in front of him. It's an extremely different approach, but an entirely legitimate one. Moreover, Danny manages to express this without problematizing the other lifestyle. There's nothing wrong with that life or with wanting that life, it's just not what he happens to want. "One person is more amazing - harder to understand but more amazing - than universes." What a beautiful sentiment. Danny is extremely good at the immediate, the personal, focusing on what's in front of him. He is incredibly present, and that's part of what makes him a good teacher, and, while not the only path, what makes him a good person as well. He knows how fragile life is.
As it turns out, though, he actually can both apologize for and undo the death he caused. Spoilers incoming if you haven't finished series 8 - but if you haven't finished series 8 why are you reading a post about Danny Pink anyway? From the perspective of Clara's story, Danny's death is stupid and pointless, and the stupidity and pointlessness of it - the offensive ordinariness of it - is what drives her over the edge a bit. But it is, of course, incredibly important to him. And if I enjoyed how Danny was handled when he was alive, I absolutely adore how he's handled once he's dead. Death in intensely personal - as Malcolm Reynolds once said: "everybody dies alone." Freed from this mortal coil as it were, Danny gets on with the business of being dead, and that mostly consists of at last having the opportunity to come face to face with the kid he killed. And it's not a punishment or a reward it just...is what it is. And it's as much about the kid getting to confront his killer as it is about catharsis for Danny. Ugh, those scenes are so good, and so incredibly real. No words even, at first, just wary staring at one another. And so of course, of course, when given the opportunity to save one life, Danny returns the life he took. Only life can pay for life. It's not about worthiness or logic or love or whatever. It's about what Danny needs to do for his own sake - correct his mistake, and make it right. It is the appropriate ending to Danny's story.
Danny is incredibly human, star to finish, through love and loss and awkward fumbling for words. And human isn't all just one thing. He's a soldier and a teacher, well-educated and soft spoken, light-hearted but heavy-souled, as it were. It is perhaps ironic that he ends up becoming an inhuman monster - but the Cybermen have always been about humanity. And CyberDanny does tell us important things about humanity; a human can choose. CyberDanny is probably the best thing to happen to Cybermen in 40 years, and justifies their inclusion in the finale all by himself. Danny never relinquishes the power to choose, in life or in death or in horrifying reanimation. Born to the name Rupert, he chooses to be Colonel Dan, the soldier so brave he doesn't need a gun. Having killed a child, he chooses to dedicate the rest of his life to children. Enchanted by a sudden world-forest, he chooses to concentrate on the people under his care. Offered the universe, he chooses Earth. Offered oblivion, he chooses memory and responsibility, however painful. Without deleting his personality, he chooses to let himself be reanimated as a perversion of science, in order to protect someone he cares about. Given the power of life and death, he chooses to make good, correcting his past mistake. And, flying fully in the face of the Cyberman narrative up to this point, he never has his emotions ripped from them - he chooses to give them up, in order to be able to accomplish the thing he's here to do. The line is "love isn't an emotion; love is a promise" - but more importantly, love is a choice. Given every opportunity to be carried along or caught up, Danny Pink chooses to choose, and to choose again. Heck, in "Last Christmas" he has more agency than Clara does, and he's a figment of her imagination at the time. He chooses for himself, without needing to control or choose for anybody else.
You can't control what happens to you, but you can always choose what you do with it. Danny Pink is a Good man, a kind man, an attentive teacher, a brave defender, and at all points, the person who chose for himself to be this and nothing else.
As Love Interest to Primary Companion, Danny invites comparison to the other such - Mickey Smith and Rory Williams. Apart from each playing Betty in a Betty-and-Veronica type dichotomous love triangle, these three gentlemen are nothing alike. One important difference is that Rory and Mickey are both "the boy next door" solid and dependable, the one who's just sort of always been there, and they get left behind when their respective ladies run off to seek Adventure. Clara, by contrast, already has all the adventure she needs, and is actively pursuing the normalcy Danny represents. Clara's relationship with Danny is brand new, and she fails utterly at it. Crucially, Danny is never a foil for the Doctor - he's a foil for Clara. His role in her story is to highlight the fact that she just doesn't belong on this planet anymore. As Clara has gotten better and better at being the Doctor, she has gotten worse and worse at being human. She tries to do the normal job, normal relationship, normal life thing and is just really phenomenally bad at it.
I often see Danny described as "clingy" or "controlling" and...I just can't see it at all. If anything, he's precisely the opposite. Wanting to be in control, and thriving when she is, is one of Clara's defining character traits. Clara is very much the center of her own narrative, but she is not the center of Danny's. It's not that Danny is controlling, it's that he is not himself controlled. (Contrast Amy and Rory, where Amy is absolutely the center of Rory's narrative). But Danny is consistently supportive, and just as his story is never centered on Clara, he never expects her story to be centered on him. He doesn't interpret the Doctor as a rival, although he does recognize that his relationship with Clara is a toxic one. Like, his first reaction isn't "this is who you're seeing instead of me," it's "he's your dad. your space...dad." The Doctor is an explanation for Clara's idiosyncrasies - she's not running of with an alien, she's an alien. It all makes sense now! In the same vein, Danny never tells her not to go with him. Again, quite the opposite. When she decides to leave, he's the one who tells her that she's not done with someone while they can still make her angry. He calls her up on the space train to see if she's having a good time. There's no begrudgement or jealousy there. Danny doesn't care that she's hanging out with the Doctor - he care's that she's lying about it.
Consider their fight from "In the Forest of the Night." Danny gets decently upset with Clara for calling up the Doctor - not because it's the Doctor but because she did it instead of doing her job. And then lied about it. If I were on a field trip trying to manage 30 kids and my co-teacher was skiving off calling one of her buddies to squee about trees I'd be pretty furious too. Painting it as simple jealousy absolves Clara of responsibility and entirely misses the point Danny is trying to make. And the point is this: All Danny ever asks of Clara is her honesty. That is it. The tragedy of their story is that this, for whatever reason, is the one thing she can't give him.
But enough about Clara. This article is not about Clara. One of the things I like about Danny is that he is, at the beginning and end of the day, not about Clara (although he does seem to like her very much), despite the fact that she actually invades his timeline at several points. He's the hero of his own story, and the glimpses we get of it are fascinating. He's an orphan, but apparently at a quite young age he reinvented and renamed himself. He's a soldier, but is neither proud nor ashamed of it. He doesn't have the baggage around the word that the Doctor has (and that Clara has picked up). He's a math teacher, and (unlike Clara) seems to be fairly decent at it, and in particular has an excellent rapport with children. That's actually something all three of them share, in wildly different ways. The Doctor is good with children because he is a child, or at least is operating on child logic most of the time; Clara is good with children because she can come at them like a friend while maintaining her own authority - she's good at setting the narrative; and Danny is good with children because he just seems to get them, and knows how to be the thing that they need. He knows how to rephrase and reframe questions. He paints himself as the authority, maintaining the student-teacher dynamic, putting on more stuffiness than he in fact shows. He's doesn't try to be their friend, he's very much always the teacher - but he's the cool teacher. And all because he seems to genuinely love the kids, problems and all.
The heart of Danny's narrative is the boy he killed in Afghanistan. It's almost the first thing we learn about him - he actually starts crying in class when pressed about it - and it's the last thing he does as well. And it's not treated as "in war these things happen." It was an accident, but that never makes it okay, and Danny takes responsibility for it. He leaves the army, but he's not ashamed of having been a soldier, he is sorry for what he, personally, did. It's just a really well done story - subtle and powerful and wholly believable, not fitting into any of the tropes the other characters keep trying to slot him into. And it's not a burning guilt, but a fundamental sadness that underlies everything that Danny does. It's like his life is already behind him. Everything you need to know about Danny Pink is that, having accidentally killed a child in war, he retires and dedicates the rest of his life to teaching children. He can neither undo nor apologize for what happened, but neither can he forget it, and so he pays it forward as best he can.
It also colors his outlook on life. Danny is unusual among Doctor Who characters in that he has no call to adventure and that's okay. He doesn't want the Doctor Who lifestyle, not because he's a homebody or lacks imagination or thinks it's too dangerous or whatever, but because he's seen too much already. He knows that life is short, and is content to make the most out of what's in front of him. It's an extremely different approach, but an entirely legitimate one. Moreover, Danny manages to express this without problematizing the other lifestyle. There's nothing wrong with that life or with wanting that life, it's just not what he happens to want. "One person is more amazing - harder to understand but more amazing - than universes." What a beautiful sentiment. Danny is extremely good at the immediate, the personal, focusing on what's in front of him. He is incredibly present, and that's part of what makes him a good teacher, and, while not the only path, what makes him a good person as well. He knows how fragile life is.
As it turns out, though, he actually can both apologize for and undo the death he caused. Spoilers incoming if you haven't finished series 8 - but if you haven't finished series 8 why are you reading a post about Danny Pink anyway? From the perspective of Clara's story, Danny's death is stupid and pointless, and the stupidity and pointlessness of it - the offensive ordinariness of it - is what drives her over the edge a bit. But it is, of course, incredibly important to him. And if I enjoyed how Danny was handled when he was alive, I absolutely adore how he's handled once he's dead. Death in intensely personal - as Malcolm Reynolds once said: "everybody dies alone." Freed from this mortal coil as it were, Danny gets on with the business of being dead, and that mostly consists of at last having the opportunity to come face to face with the kid he killed. And it's not a punishment or a reward it just...is what it is. And it's as much about the kid getting to confront his killer as it is about catharsis for Danny. Ugh, those scenes are so good, and so incredibly real. No words even, at first, just wary staring at one another. And so of course, of course, when given the opportunity to save one life, Danny returns the life he took. Only life can pay for life. It's not about worthiness or logic or love or whatever. It's about what Danny needs to do for his own sake - correct his mistake, and make it right. It is the appropriate ending to Danny's story.
Danny is incredibly human, star to finish, through love and loss and awkward fumbling for words. And human isn't all just one thing. He's a soldier and a teacher, well-educated and soft spoken, light-hearted but heavy-souled, as it were. It is perhaps ironic that he ends up becoming an inhuman monster - but the Cybermen have always been about humanity. And CyberDanny does tell us important things about humanity; a human can choose. CyberDanny is probably the best thing to happen to Cybermen in 40 years, and justifies their inclusion in the finale all by himself. Danny never relinquishes the power to choose, in life or in death or in horrifying reanimation. Born to the name Rupert, he chooses to be Colonel Dan, the soldier so brave he doesn't need a gun. Having killed a child, he chooses to dedicate the rest of his life to children. Enchanted by a sudden world-forest, he chooses to concentrate on the people under his care. Offered the universe, he chooses Earth. Offered oblivion, he chooses memory and responsibility, however painful. Without deleting his personality, he chooses to let himself be reanimated as a perversion of science, in order to protect someone he cares about. Given the power of life and death, he chooses to make good, correcting his past mistake. And, flying fully in the face of the Cyberman narrative up to this point, he never has his emotions ripped from them - he chooses to give them up, in order to be able to accomplish the thing he's here to do. The line is "love isn't an emotion; love is a promise" - but more importantly, love is a choice. Given every opportunity to be carried along or caught up, Danny Pink chooses to choose, and to choose again. Heck, in "Last Christmas" he has more agency than Clara does, and he's a figment of her imagination at the time. He chooses for himself, without needing to control or choose for anybody else.
You can't control what happens to you, but you can always choose what you do with it. Danny Pink is a Good man, a kind man, an attentive teacher, a brave defender, and at all points, the person who chose for himself to be this and nothing else.