SAME MAN, DIFFERENT TIME: META ON GODHOOD AND POWERS IN THE TEN AND ELEVEN ERAS.
topaz_eyes and I were having a v. interesting conversation on solitary_summer’s LJ, but when she posted the following comment I realised I needed to make a post, because even just thinking about the answer I knew it’d fill up about 4 comment boxes. (It ended up around 8000 words, in the end. Approximately.) Plus it was wildly off topic for the post it was in…
Because this post is all about Ten and Eleven and power. (And related topics, such as their place in the universe and whether this has changed with a new head writer and how god-like they are etc. Did I mention that I ramble?)
Disclaimer: Whenever I compare something, I’m not saying that one is better than the other. I love Ten HUGELY, and wouldn’t want him any different, and ditto for Eleven. Nor am I saying that I am right, just that this is how I see things, and I love how the character of the Doctor has grown and changed. Same man, different time. That’s the key for me. (Gorgeous, gorgeous banner made for me by kathyh - because I wanted those words illustrated, and she then distracted me hugely with Teh Pretty... Also thanks to owlsie for the podcast, and (since we share a brain) about half of this belongs to promethia_tenk. Don't ask me which half though.)
OK, first of all topaz_eyes’s comment in full. I shall then pull things out of it, in order to argue with discuss the finer points. (The stuff in italics is her quoting my previous comment.)
Yep yep. The story's the thing. And yep, Eleven is about looking outwards, back into a sense of place in the cosmos.
RTD is the one who keeps bringing in the Doctor as a God-like figure, whereas Moffat firmly pulls him down to earth.
That's interesting, because I see them in a completely opposite light. I think it's because I agree with green_maia's observation: in the RTD-verse, the universe is bigger than the Doctor, while in the Moffat-verse, the Doctor is bigger than the universe. RTD cast the Doctor as a god-like figure, yes--and then he deconstructed the concept. (E.g., I don't think it was coincidence that when the Doctor was portrayed as the most god-like, he was also portrayed as the most monstrous.) Nine stated in "Boom Town": "Don't worship me - I'd make a very bad God." Ten's run proved why that statement was true. By the end of "Waters of Mars," the Doctor was left as powerless as the rest of humanity.
So far, I'm not convinced--yet--that Moffat has pulled Eleven down to earth. (This is why I'm looking forward to S6.) As I see it, Eleven's not portrayed as God-like, but as a wizard. He's a kindly, old, wise wizard, but he's still cast as a magical archetype first. The whole concept of "Time can be rewritten" means the power to shape and reshape universes, seemingly without limits, according to how one deems it should be. Eleven has this power. That seems like a true god-like power to me...
Storytellers as gods. Absolutely. *g*
Just because a story isn't real, doesn't mean it can't be true. That's how magic works in Moffat's world.
Yup. To me, that's a magical concept, because one has to believe the story is true in the absence of proof that it is true. Which kinda contradicts atheism, as I understand it, anyway.
Well then, let’s go to work - I’ve decided to divide the meta up into subsections in order to keep my different points manageable. Because I am wordy. topaz_eyes comments in italics.
1. I’M A TIMELORD, NOT A HUMAN BEING. I WALK IN ETERNITY.
Now to me, these two statements are in direct opposition:
a) And yep, Eleven is about looking outwards, back into a sense of place in the cosmos.
b) in the RTD-verse, the universe is bigger than the Doctor, while in the Moffat-verse, the Doctor is bigger than the universe.
I remember reading that post of Maia’s where she put forward that theory and whilst it’s something I can get my head around when I concentrate, it never lasts, and every time I come across it I go ‘Huh?’ all over again.
For me, the narrative plays a huge part in how I see the shows and the characters, and (as has been stated repeatedly) in Rusty’s Who the Doctor is the main character, the protagonist, the one whose eyes we see the world through. The universe is important because of how it relates to the Doctor. He fights against it and its laws in Waters of Mars (“The Laws of Time are mine and they will obey me!”), and he rails against it in End of Time (“It’s not fair!”) - as if somehow the universe was sentient and out to get him. Yes it’s bigger than him, obviously, but it’s like a character in its own right. An enemy that the Doctor tries to defeat and control (something which is of course impossible).
Eleven on the other hand (thanks to having been Ten, me thinks) accepts that certain things are unfixable, that the world is big and uncontrollable. (“Life is a pile of good things and bad things.”) When he says goodbye to little Amelia he is sad, but resigned, and leaves his fate to the memory of a young girl… He can rewrite the whole universe, but he can’t save himself. That to me speaks volumes.
Looking at what I’ve written, then maybe I can see your point after all. Except I can’t see how Moffat makes the Doctor bigger than the universe… All he does is put things back where they belong - the universe is once again nothing more than matter that can be manipulated, not a foe to defeat.
Actually, having thought about it some more, then I think it comes down to difference of writing. RTD (being RTD) tackles the god thing head on - you have a character with god-like powers, so he takes it to extremes. How far can it go? How far can he go? What can and can’t he do? Etc.
Moffat does something else, something which is integral to the idea of the Doctor in the first place - it’s a difference of perspective, of seeing the world ‘as the gods see it’... The ancient Greeks considered comedy (the gods' view of life) as superior to tragedy (the merely human). This (or the opposite POV, rather) is actually examined in the brilliant Marble House, wherein the vidder criticises the Doctor (the Tenth Doctor at the time) very harshly for meddling in the affairs of humanity and then just moving on, looking for something new and shiny, as the world suffers. I find this an interesting topic (and one I’ve written about in the past), but to be honest the only thing the Doctor can do is move on.
This is where his alienness comes into play - he is a creature with a far longer lifespan than most others, and because of that sees the world through very different eyes. Ten tried to be human (in his outlook) and a god (in his actions) and neither worked. (I’m drawing heavily on this meta by sensiblecat btw) When Eleven comes round he has the sense to see that he can only be what he is. And yes, that involves some distance, and the use of a perspective that humans can’t grasp.
There is a very good (although relentlessly bleak, because it deals with the Doctor's loneliness) Ten vid ( New Dawn Fades) which starts out with the perfect example of this non-human perspective: The TARDIS goes from Earth’s very beginning, to the present day, to the moment the world is finally destroyed - all in the matter of seconds. That’s how the Doctor sees everything. He even comments on it in the second of the ‘Meanwhile in the TARDIS’ mini episodes. The end and the beginning and middle - it's all the same to him.
But this perspective does not make him a god. It makes him a Timelord:
ROSE: I can see everything. All that is... all that was... all that ever could be.
[The Doctor stands up abruptly, looking down at her as if suddenly, he understands]
THE DOCTOR: That's what I see. All the time. And doesn't it drive you mad?
ROSE: My head...
THE DOCTOR: Come here.
ROSE: ... it's killing me...
THE DOCTOR: Some things are fixed, some things are in flux. Pompeii is fixed.
DONNA: How do you know which is which?
THE DOCTOR: Because that's how I see the universe. Every waking second, I can see what is, what was... what could be, what must not. That's the burden of the Time Lord, Donna.
Now Eleven wears this burden far more lightly than Ten, harking back to the Classic!Who Doctors. Best described by this quote (From this article):
Oddly, in trying to describe this element of "Doctorness," I keep coming back to the idea of age. Though the Doctor may be 450-ish, or nearly 1,000, depending on the story, Tom Baker's Doctor was mind-numbingly old. Eternally young of spirit, perhaps, but he fairly dripped of being old. Old even well beyond whatever his age might be. The kind of age that comes with having seen the Universe in a way mere humans could never really comprehend. Partially a wisdom and experience that allowed The Doctor to look at events from a different perspective, but more than that. It was some kind of specifically ancient sensibility that ruled out the possibility of urgency. Baker's Doctor was often distracted in the most intense moments, simply because of this unique perspective of events, and even when running somehow managed to seem like he didn't really mean it.
Personally then I like the alienness. (I still remember being impatient when watching 'Rose' for the very first time - Rose was nice and all, but I'd been promised an alien, y'know?) I'm not bothered about powers as such, but about the way in which he is just different. (Hence my deep and abiding love for 'The Lodger'.) Seeing all of history at once plays into his difference, and the way he behaves. There is a lovely moment in 'Dreamland' (a cartoon set during the Specials era) wherein the nice alien (a grey) wants to destroy the nasty aliens (Viperox) since they go around obliterating planets, the grey's included - and the Doctor says no. Not because the Viperox don't deserve it, but because with time they'll evolve into a peace-loving species. (Of course there's also the thing about not committing genocide!) But it touches on how righting one wrong could undo other rights. It's a balance, and the Doctor's role (as a Timelord, seeing the whole picture), is to preserve history. How many times does he arrive somewhere and start investigating because something is wrong? (The technology is too advanced/not advanced enough is a common one.)
It's not about *control*, but ensuring the smooth running/unfolding of history.
2. BUT DOTH SUFFER A SEA-CHANGE INTO SOMETHING RICH AND STRANGE.
Or, I can illustrate the Ten/Eleven differences with water imagery. (See kaffyr’s Time and Tide meta.) Ten tried to fight the water (time), but water always wins. What Eleven begins to (re-)learn is that he needs to follow the water. See the way he (eventually) gets rid of the angels in Flesh and Stone. Winning the day isn’t about defeating the enemy, about being bigger and stronger and forcing a surrender - it’s about finding the key to everything, the point about which everything pivots, and change that. Go with the water, not against it, and the water will do the work for you. (This is also where River is so significant symbolically. But that’s another post.)
In my mind, one of the clear distinctions between Ten and Eleven is in the imagery. Ten I associate with fire:
LATIMER: “He's like fire and ice and rage. He's like the night, and the storm in the heart of the sun.”
~
MARTHA: 'Cause you know the Doctor, he's wonderful, he's brilliant, but he's like fire -- stand to close and people get burned.
He’s wonderful, but dangerous - think of the flames leaping around him as he kills the Rachnoss, or as he finally breaks down on Mars. I often think of him as being like a sun - burning up, and then becoming like a black hole, causing everything to fall into him. And water - time - is his natural enemy. He drowns in the Turn Left parallel world. And on Mars a single drop is enough to kill you…
Eleven, OTOH is borne out of fire and water, emerging - drenched to the skin - out of his glowing TARDIS in Amelia’s garden, and joyfully leaping back in when he sets off. It takes him a while to get used to it, to learn how to swim in the tides of time once more, but he gets there.
(Water imagery is everywhere in Moffat's Who, but that too is a different post.)
3. THE DOCTOR IN THE TARDIS DOESN’T KNOW.
So far, I'm not convinced--yet--that Moffat has pulled Eleven down to earth.
This is another point where I get all baffled, so first of all I’m going to talk about how often the Doctor is wrong in S5, because IMHO that season is in many ways a catalogue of Eleven stumbling, and needing others in order to save the say. And (mostly) his wrongness is not just in the details, but in fundamentally misunderstanding the situations:
- He is twelve years late for Amy. Unlike most companions whom he rather sweeps off their feet, with Amy he has to fight for her trust every step of the way - the whole season is about him trying to make up for that first accident and try to put Amy back together after accidentally breaking her. He saves the world with a supreme confidence, but then he has done that many, many times before. Trying to save a broken child - now that’s something else. Moffat doesn’t focus on the big picture, but the tiny miniature. (Notice how the finale centers around 4 people in a museum at the end of the universe. No big battles. No armies. A single Dalek thrown in to keep everyone on their toes. The whole of the drama comes from the characters.)
- He is wrong about the starwhale. His own issues blind him to the truth and he almost commits an atrocious crime. Amy saves the day.
- He falls into the Dalek’s trap (twice) and the Daleks win. They played him perfectly, and Earth was almost destroyed as a consequence (plus, now they’re out there once more…). And all because he lost his temper. Again, Amy is the one to find the key to saving the day. (And the ways in which the Doctor equals life with pain speaks VOLUMES about how much of Ten there’s still left inside.)
- He is dangerously wrong about the angels, and almost gets Amy killed. (River is the one who saves her. After the Doctor told her that the teleport couldn’t be fixed. Good thing River doesn’t listen.) Not to mention all the clerics who get eaten by the crack. And all because the Doctor made a fatal mistake.
- Through the Dream Lord the Doctor’s darkness is shown as malicious and manipulative and very dangerous.
- His curiosity about the crack [in]directly leads to Rory’s death.
- He almost blows up the planet in The Lodger, quite simply by being who he is. If it hadn’t been for Craig and Sophie the solar system would have gone supernova.
- He falls into the Alliance’s trap (hook, line and sinker), and if it hadn’t been for plastic!Rory surviving, and managing to stay ‘human’, the universe would actually have ended for good.
- He re-writes Kazran, and yet it is Abigail’s singing which eventually saves the day, because the Doctor ends up re-writing him too much.
As far as I can see he is consistently shown as bumbling along as best he can, and half the time his involvement makes things worse… He is almost painfully fallible, IMHO. If Ten needed companions in order not to go off the rails, then Eleven needs them in order not to do something *stupid*, or to stop him getting distracted at the critical moment.
Coming at it from a more Doylist perspective, however, Moffat is consistently the one who refuses to put the Doctor on a pedestal - or rather, he doesn’t let the Doctor’s Companions put him on a pedestal, something which Rusty’s have a tendency to do. And this is quite deliberate on Rusty’s part. Two excerpts from The Writer’s Tale to illustrate my point. The first one is about Penny, the Companion who never was since Catherine Tate agreed to come back as Donna. But this was what could have been:
Last night as I lay in bed I found myself thinking, Penny should be jilted. In Scene 1. Leaving her raw and open for a dazzling Time Lord to enter her life.
In the second one he's talking about writing the scene between Donna and Wilf (at that point Geoff) up on the hill, Donna waiting for the Doctor. And this is how he was thinking of ending it:
Donna: "Yeah. That's what I'm gonna do. If I have to wait a hundred years. I'll find him."
Geoff (laughing): "God help him."
Donna: "Oh yes!"
I'm not sure about the last couple of lines. I thought Donna's big speech was a bit too 'written', so those two little grace-note lines take the edge off it. It's more natural now. Less pretentious. It was too Disney before, and now it's more me. Plus, it's nice to see them laughing. Laughing in the dark. But I still might go back to the original, because Disney is good and I'm worried that the throwaway laughter undercuts the drama of a woman dreaming of the Doctor. I don't know.
‘The drama of a woman dreaming of the Doctor’. <- pedestal. (And that is *Donna*, the one without a romantic investment… The one who'd declared that the Doctor 'scared her to death'.)
This is worlds away from ‘Twelve years and four psychiatrists’. Or to quote a scene that will apparently turn up in S6 (but really, no spoilers at all):
Amy tells Rory off for leaving the Doctor on his own, and Rory says, 'Well, he's a Time Lord, he'll be fine." And she looks at Rory with infinite compassion and says, 'Rory, it's just what they're called. it doesn't mean he actually knows what he's doing.'
I’m also reminded of the podcast for ‘Forest of the Dead’ (with RTD, Moffat and DT - it's a complete and utter lovefest) where Moffat talks about the moment where River whispers the Doctor’s name in his ear.
Moffat: And I have to say, David, I think your performance in this is astonishing. There are two bits that are brilliant. It’s this, where you’re just flung back to being a man - you’re just an ordinary bloke for a minute - and this bit here where you shoulder the Doctor again… There we are, the mask back on!
RTD: You see how much the Doctor is-
Moffat: -is surface.
RTD: -a pose.
(Please do not think that I’m putting Rusty down. I might have a few issues with how he lets companions view him, but this is ameliorated by the suspicion that there’s nothing Rusty would love more than for the Doctor to sweep him off his feet… <3)
Or, to quote snowgrouse, who really summed up this whole section in a few lines:
I've discovered the main difference between Ten and Eleven (or, well, Rusty's and Moff's ways of writing the Doctor, really). Observe:
Ten: "I. AM. AMAZING!" *Does something amazing, poses proudly*
Rose: *licks teeth*
Martha: *gazes longingly*
Donna: "Harrumph."
Whereas...
"Eleven: Just watch this, c'mon, you'll see, I am ama--" *falls on his arse*
Amy: *facepalm*
QED ;)
4. THE LONELY GOD.
Nine stated in "Boom Town": "Don't worship me - I'd make a very bad God."
This is a very offhand remark (and such a Dotor-y line!), and one that’s very true! The god theme is revisited again in the S1 finale where the Dalek emperor declares himself god, and the Doctor given the title of ‘Heathen’. I’m not really going to go into all that, but it’s certainly a strong theme, including Rose’s god-powers from absorbing the vortex, with which she destroys the Daleks and creates immortal!Jack. Nothing much to do with the Doctor though, apart from that one line. (As far as I recall.)
But Ten, however, is given the title in the very first episode of S2:
NOVICE HAME : It's said he'll talk to a wanderer. To the man without a home. The lonely God.
It comes back in S3 - first in Gridlock, where Ten holds on to his Lonely God status:
MARTHA: But what did he mean, the Face of Boe? "You're not alone."
THE DOCTOR: I don't know.
MARTHA: You've got me. Is that what he meant?
THE DOCTOR: I don't think so. Sorry.
And again in the Family of Blood episodes:
LATIMER: Because...I've seen him. He's...like fire and ice and rage. He's like the night and the storm in the heart of the 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.
(Interestingly, after The Big Bang, the Doctor does burn at the centre of time. But he’s not ‘forever’ - that would be godhood proper.)
BAINES: He never raised his voice. That was the worst thing. The fury of the Time Lord. And then we discovered why. Why this Doctor, who had fought with gods and demons, why he'd run away from us and hidden--he was being kind.
Ten, very much, is made in the mould of an Old Testament god - ‘wrath’ is a word that fits entirely too well with his actions when he is angry. And the punishment is truly horrific and god-like:
BAINES: We wanted to live forever, so the Doctor made sure that we did.
Then of course there is the S3 finale and Tinkerbell!Doctor who saves the world because people believe in him.
In S4 we have a ton of prophecies, he and Donna become ‘household gods’ for the family they save from Pompeii, not to mention the DoctorDonna (‘the threefold man’ - VERY thinly veiled Trinity reference there, Rusty).
The prophecy theme is continued in the Specials both in regards to the Doctor’s death, and when it comes to the fate of the Timelords.
Surely I don’t have to talk about Waters of Mars and the Doctor’s ‘I can do anything!’, right? The Timelord Victorious is Ten claiming godlike powers, followed by a refusal to accept his impeding death (standing in the TARDIS, wondering whether to follow Oood Sigma... and then: "No!") - something echoed in End of Time, and Rassilon’s plan:
Rassilon: On your knees, mankind!
[…]
Rassilon: We will ascend! To become creatures of consciousness alone. Free of these bodies. Free of time and cause and effect. And where creation itself ceases to be!
Pure godhood, right there. That is what Timelords are capable of being. The Doctor’s fear of death taken to its utmost extreme. He rejects it (again), but the parallels between the Doctor’s rage in the face of death (“But me! I could do so much more! And it’s not fair!”) mirrors Rassilon’s very closely. (“I. Will. Not. Die!”)
Godhood is one of the central themes to RTD’s Who (the flipside to the human aspect), and if the Doctor ultimately fails in his war against fate and the universe, then it’s because he is not ready to go the whole way. (Because he’s the Doctor and not actually insane. When it comes down to it, he’s always the man who’ll die rather than watching others suffer.)
5. AND THEY WILL OBEY ME.
By the end of "Waters of Mars," the Doctor was left as powerless as the rest of humanity.
Was he really?
I can’t for a minute accept that he couldn’t have gone back in time by a couple of minutes, snuck in the back of Adelaide’s house and stopped her from killing herself. (He could have made the shot miss so it’d still ring out in the street, preserving the timeline).
His reaction to Adelaide’s suicide is ‘I’ve gone too far!’ - a truly painful wake-up call to what he's become (a person he truly admires *killed* herself because of him). He thinks Ood Sigma is a harbinger of his death. (And we see how swiftly his mind jumps from Adelaide, and towards himself...) Yes RTD does somewhat deconstruct the God thing as regards the Doctor himself, but there is still that overwhelming sense of something out there - the Doctor expects some kind of punishment in return for his actions. For a man who professes to be an atheist, that’s… interesting. (I mean the Doctor, not Rusty, although for an atheist writer to put that in, is certainly something to make a note of.) Anyway, the Doctor’s fate turns out to be in his own hands, and the prophecies self-fulfilling (if he’d not run away from his death, he wouldn’t have died.)
The god-theme is so tightly woven in that it’s hard to escape, and Ten is more and more ‘The Lonely God’ as time goes on - he even holds his regeneration at bay for far, far too long, to the end trying to defy nature. (He’s stubborn, bless him. Which is one of the reasons I love him so. And I adore the god-theme btw. It was what first made me fall for the show properly, and from then on meta would never leave me alone. As it happens there is a vid all about the Doctor's god-like qualities: Agnus Dei.)
But, if Rusty suddenly had a Damascene conversion, I’d not be in the least surprised. (Ditto Dawkins.) When you go make something you don’t believe in central to what you do, it’s bound to make people wonder.
And we see Ten offered Godhood very early on in his life. The central threat of 'School Reunion' comes from the Krillitane trying to crack The Skasis Paradigm:
The Doctor: The... God-maker. The universal theory. Crack that equation and you've got control of the building blocks of the universe. Time and space and matter, yours to control.
And the Doctor is offered that power:
MR FINCH: The Paradigm gives us power, but you could give us wisdom. Become a God. At my side. Imagine what you could do -- think of the civilizations you could save. Perganon, Assinta... your own people, Doctor. Standing tall. The Time Lords... reborn.
THE DOCTOR: I could save everyone...
MR FINCH: Yes.
THE DOCTOR (whispers): I could stop the war...
He is brought back from the brink, partly because of Sarah Jane reminding him that loss and pain are an important part of life, but he is very, very tempted. Power and control (especially the power to stop the pain) was always Ten's weakness. And the danger was that these were *not* beyond him... ( I think a full-out Time Lord meltdown would bring down galaxies and that's always lurking just below the surface with this Doctor). If he truly was as helpless as a human, then the tension in the story would be of a very different kind - RTD told that story with Jack and Torchwood. (Also see Above and Below, which parallels and contrasts the Doctor and Jack.)
6. I AM DEFINITELY A MAD MAN WITH A BOX
Now, I am actually struggling to think of anything God-related in S5 apart from this quote (which is a denial of it):
RIVER: Where do I come from? Your world has visitors. You're all Barbarians now.
COMMANDER: What is that? Tell me, what?
RIVER: A fool would say, the work of the gods. But you've been a soldier too long to believe there are gods watching over us. There is, however, a man. And tonight he's going to need your help.
Otherwise, it’s just not there. (He threatens now and again, but never from that specific vantage point.) Well, there's the Pandorica speech, but apart from admiring the sheer balls of the man, that moment is all smoke and mirrors (and well the Doctor knows it). It’s the most beautiful example of this (again from the Forest of the Dead podcast):
Moffat: It’s the interesting thing about the Doctor, isn’t it? What is it that’s special about him? In terms of writing him he’s not faster or stronger, actually. He can regenerate, which is pretty cool, but not all the time... and he’s superclever, but actually the people he’s up against are superclever, so it’s not that. I think it’s almost the power of the greatest gob in the universe - he can sort of talk his way, confidently, past anybody
DT: Which he slightly abuses there because he’s been slightly undermined. He shouts too loudly and is a bit nasty to the team…
Moff: But look - they’re all confident in him now. [umming awing] He’s almost a charlatan - in a good cause! - he poses, doesn’t he? He makes it seem like he’s this god-like creature, and he kinda, really, there’s just a bloke under there.
RTD: Oh absolutely.
Moff: Which I think makes him great fun to write.
The end of 'The Pandorica Opens' is Victory of the Daleks all over again. Because when it comes down to it, his enemies can quite simply grab hold of him and lock him up…
Of course there's the fact that he reboots the universe, but I honestly had to be reminded of it - it's not presented as god-like, just as The Solution To Fixing The Problem. Something which is foreshadowed in 'Flesh and Stone':
RIVER: That time energy, what's it going to do?
DOCTOR: Er, keep eating.
RIVER: How do we stop it?
DOCTOR: Feed it.
RIVER: Feed it what?
DOCTOR: A big complicated space-time event should shut it up for a while.
RIVER: Like what, for instance?
DOCTOR (shouts): Like *me*, for instance!
Come The Big Bang the problem is so immense that the Doctor barely blinks at the price he has to pay. Someone else could have done it, since it doesn't require a Timelord to carry out the plan, but he *would* have needed to be handcuffed in order for anyone else to take his place (see River sacrificing herself in 'Forest of the Dead' in his stead) - not to mention that he is half dead already, thanks to the Dalek. And - he's doing it for Amy. This is the framework within which his sacrifice is presented:
And old man dies. A young girl lives. Fair trade.
Eleven is 'a mad man with a box', be it the TARDIS or the Pandorica - not a god. Of course that doesn't mean that he can't be dark. From a recent interview with the Moff himself:
“There’s some extraordinary stuff coming from Matt this year. When he goes dark - the Doctor should never be that dark, he’s not a dark man - but when he goes dark it’s properly tingly, properly exciting. We’re certainly seeing sides of him and parts of his behaviour and some of his heart that we haven’t seen in the previous year.”
His darkness is of a very different kind than Ten's. We saw part of it with the Dream Lord, and there's a moment in the trailer for S6 which I've talked about before:
Unknown enemy: "Fear me. I've killed hundreds of Time Lords."
The Doctor: "Fear me. I've killed all of them."
Eleven has a wonderful way of being quietly threatening, but there is a certain eye-roll factor to the way he delivers the line. I can pretty much hear him thinking: "Oh you're evil, I get it. My ex-boyfriend was like that all the time! It's neither big nor clever, so just stop it already."
He can stand up to anyone, especially if he has something specific to fight for ("Leaving is good - never coming back is better."/"I'm sorry you're dead, Bob, but I swear to whatever is left of you, they will be sorrier."/"Because you didn't remember her name."), but otherwise he couldn't care less what people think, and - much like Nine - would certainly reject any attempt at placing Godhood on his shoulders. Way too much responsibility and gravitas associated with it for his tastes. ;)
7. TIME CAN BE REWRITTEN.
The whole concept of "Time can be rewritten" means the power to shape and reshape universes, seemingly without limits, according to how one deems it should be. Eleven has this power. That seems like a true god-like power to me...
This is another one of those times where I have to scratch my head, because the Doctor is the Doctor is the Doctor. Eleven does not suddenly acquire this new and godlike power after he regenerates. He’s a Timelord, rewriting time is an inherent ability. (The clue is in the name…) What Eleven does, the other Doctors (and Timelords), could, and did, do. Quite a lot, actually. The only difference is perspective, or narrative voice, or presentation, or focus, or word choice - whatever you want to call it. In essence, they’re the same:
- Going back to Classic!Who, then in ‘Genesis of the Daleks’ the Fourth Doctor is instructed by the Timelords to interfere in the creation of the Daleks on the planet Skaro in order to avert a future time where Daleks would dominate the universe. Of course, things do not go to plan:
The Doctor: If someone who knew the future, pointed out a child to you and told you that that child would grow up totally evil, to be a ruthless dictator who would destroy millions of lives... could you then kill that child?
Sarah: We're talking about the Daleks. The most evil creatures ever invented. You must destroy them. You must complete your mission for the Time Lords!
The Doctor: Do I have the right? Simply touch one wire against the other and that's it. The Daleks cease to exist. Hundreds of millions of people, thousands of generations can live without fear... in peace, and never even know the word "Dalek".
Sarah: Then why wait? If it was a disease or some sort of bacteria you were destroying, you wouldn't hesitate.
The Doctor: 'But if I kill. Wipe out a whole intelligent life form, then I become like them. I'd be no better than the Daleks.
The Doctor’s problem isn’t with the idea of rewriting time, but with the outcome, and what his actions would turn him into. We see Nine struggling with the same kind of dilemma in ‘Parting of the Ways’, and reaching the same decision.
- In New!Who, then as early as ‘Father’s Day’, Rose’s life gets rewritten (the hit-and-run driver, who ends up not running, and the young girl who stayed by her father’s side...)
- Ten rewrites not just Harriet Jones’ life, but the history of Britain with six words. Because she pissed him off. (Makes Eleven’s rewriting of Kazran seem positively plodding, and his motives - saving Amy, Rory and the 4000 other people on the spaceship - pure as the driven snow.)
- From ‘The Runaway Bride’:
DONNA: Wish we had a time machine. Then we could go back and get it right.
THE DOCTOR: ... Yeah, yeah. But... even if I did, I couldn't go back on someone's personal timeline. Apparently.
Oh Doctor. Trying to break the laws of time to get Rose back…
- From ‘The Shakespeare Code’:
MARTHA: The thing is, though... am I missing something here? The world didn’t end in 1599. It just didn’t. Look at me - I’m living proof.
THE DOCTOR: Oh, how to explain the mechanics of the infinite temporal flux? I know! 'Back to the Future'! It’s like 'Back to the Future'!
MARTHA: The film?
THE DOCTOR: No, the novelisation. Yes, the film. Marty McFly goes back and changes history.
MARTHA: And he starts fading away. Oh my God, am I gonna fade?
THE DOCTOR: You and the entire future of the human race. It ends right now in 1599 if we don’t stop it.
Rewriting time can be fatally easy. And in the wrong hands…
- In ‘The Last of the Timelords’ the Master and the Doctor have the following exchange:
DOCTOR: But you're changing history. Not just Earth, the entire universe.
MASTER: I'm a Time Lord. I have that right.
DOCTOR: But even then, why come all this way just to destroy?
This is one of my favouritest conversations from all of DW ever. The Doctor believes that the Master is wrong to re-write history the way he is - yet he agrees that as Timelords they have, not just the power, but the right to ‘to shape and reshape universes, seemingly without limits, according to how one deems it should be’...
- The idea crops up again in the Library episodes:
RIVER: If you die here, it'll mean I've never met you.
DOCTOR: Time can be rewritten.
RIVER: Not those times. Not one line! Don't you dare!
‘Time can be rewritten’. A statement of fact. By Ten. And he would probably have done it too, if River hadn’t told him ‘No’ in no uncertain terms. (She knows him so well…)
- Ten rewrites Donna, in mere seconds. (“That version of Donna is dead”)
- Ten rewrites a fixed point in time, on Mars, with time itself fighting against him. (This only ever works for me if I think of time as water.)
- Ten rewrites history, as we hear at the beginning of 'End of Time': "Got married, that was a mistake. Good queen Bess and let me tell you, her nickname is no longer... ahem, anyway…"
If you can travel in time, you can rewrite it. Moffat likes the intricacies of this kind of story, so that’s what he writes. And has just as much right to do so (if not more so, as time travel is integral to the whole concept of the show) as Rusty had to make the Doctor 'a bleak, existential figure consumed by loss and despair'. (And how. *pets poor Ten*)
And... isn’t rewriting time/people what the Doctor does every time he interferes? It's even addressed in canon now and again. Some are grateful, despite everything:
REINETTE: It's the way it's always been. The monsters and the Doctor. It seems you cannot have one without the other.
ROSE: Tell me about it. (pause) The thing is... you weren't supposed to have either. Those creatures are messing with history. None of this was ever supposed to happen to you.
REINETTE (angrily): Supposed to happen? What does that mean? It happened, child. And I would not have it any other way. One may tolerate a world of demons for the sake of an angel.
And some are bitter:
JOAN: Answer me this, just one question. That's all. If the Doctor had never visited us, if he'd never chosen this place on a whim...would anyone here have died?
Now all this doesn't mean that the Doctor is 'in control' all the time, his relationship with River being the best example of the precarious nature of the life he leads. The whole issue about 'Spoilers' is their way of trying to somehow not unsettle the fragile balance they keep - any misstep and their whole history unravels.
AMY: You've got to go, you know you have. You've got all that stuff with River and that's all got to happen. You know you can't die here!
DOCTOR: Time can be re-written, it doesn't work like that.
But to summarise: The Doctor meddles. Always has, always will. And when he does, time is rewritten. (Plus, the day usually gets saved!)
8. TRUST ME.
‘Just because a story isn't real, doesn't mean it can't be true. That's how magic works in Moffat's world.’
Yup. To me, that's a magical concept, because one has to believe the story is true in the absence of proof that it is true. Which kinda contradicts atheism, as I understand it, anyway.
This one’s going to require subheadings.
a) Atheism, as far as I am aware, means a disbelief in God, specifically. And speaking of 'proof' then I would like to know how an atheist would *prove* that there is no God. I'm not about to argue whether God exists, I merely want to point out that both positions require faith. A godless universe is as much of a story as a created one - what you do is choose which story you feel has the most, or the most convincing, proof. [This is discussed at length in the comments. Please don't bring it up again.]
The moon landing for example is disbelieved by a great number of people, and huge swathes of science requires us to take it on trust - like the existence of dark matter for example. Not to mention history, all of which we have to take on trust. In most cases we weight the evidence, and declare it sufficient for us.
b) Stories can be true, even if they aren’t real. To use a handy example, consider Romeo and Juliet. They are not real. Their story is fiction. And yet their story, more than any other, has become a template for what love is, getting to the very heart of the truth about love. ETA: Or, as has been pointed out, a truth about love.
Also consider this story:
“My cousin Helen, who is in her 90s now, was in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II. She and a bunch of the girls in the ghetto had to do sewing each day. And if you were found with a book, it was an automatic death penalty. She had gotten hold of a copy of ‘Gone With the Wind’, and she would take three or four hours out of her sleeping time each night to read. And then, during the hour or so when they were sewing the next day, she would tell them all the story. These girls were risking certain death for a story. And when she told me that story herself, it actually made what I do feel more important. Because giving people stories is not a luxury. It’s actually one of the things that you live and die for.”
- Neil Gaiman
Stories can be worth dying for...
c) The Doctor is a story, and he knows this:
Mr Lux: And who is the Doctor?
River: The only story you'll ever tell - if you survive him.
~
DOCTOR: That's a fairy tale.
RIVER: (laughs) Oh, Doctor, aren't we all?
This again ties in with the fact that he's an inveterate liar. (And he's been a liar from Day 1. No really, the First Doctor lied through his teeth to get his own way!) Telling stories is his way of controlling the world, and how people see him:
THE DOCTOR: I lied to you, 'cause I liked it. I could pretend. Just for a bit, I could imagine they were still alive, underneath a burnt orange sky.
Even his name is a story, a title, an affectation. And what does he always say?
“Trust me, I’m the Doctor.”
Trust requires faith. Every time he turns up somewhere new, and starts saving the day, he asks that people trust him, often without the slightest hint of proof. This is an integral part of the whole show:
DONNA (fearfully): I can't do it.
THE DOCTOR (calmly): Trust me.
DONNA: Is that what you said to her? Your friend? The one you lost? Did she trust you?
THE DOCTOR: Yes, she did. And she is not dead. She is so alive. Now, jump!
A leap of faith there, quite literally! :) Is that magic?
Staying with RTD, then the S3 finale hinges on the whole *world* believing in Martha's story (which humanity has to take with no more proof than Martha's word).
But - the interesting thing about Moffat is that he tackles this issue head-on. "Trust me, I'm the Doctor!" Eleven says to Amelia - and then goes on to break that trust, showing how fallible he can be. (And then he spends the rest of the season showing her that he/his story is worth believing in after all...) Plus Angel Bob, devastatingly: "You told me my fear would keep me alive but I died afraid, in pain and alone. You made me trust you, and when it mattered, you let me down."
Going back to the magic of fairy tales, then there's the Pandorica - it's a fairy tale made real, literally.
I'm honestly not sure where I'm going with this. I just know that stories are important. Stories are like maps - they contain information to guide you through life, and even though the story isn't real, the wisdom it contains can be true.
(ETA: Also see: Stories We Tell Our Children.)
9. SPACE GANDALF. OR THE LITTLE GREEN ONE FROM STAR WARS.
As I see it, Eleven's not portrayed as God-like, but as a wizard. He's a kindly, old, wise wizard, but he's still cast as a magical archetype first.
I've already talked about re-writing time, but just wanted to briefly pull out the wizard comment, just to make sure that we are talking about the same thing. To go with both the examples that the Doctor himself gives, then they are mentors - the ones pushing their young charges to go out into the world and discover their destiny/who they are. And this, I think, is not something that's specific to Eleven - it's an inherently Doctor-y trait. Think of Luke Skywalker, or Bilbo or Frodo, and then compare to this speech by Rose:
ROSE: For the first nineteen years of my life, nothing happened. Nothing at all. Not ever. And then I met a man called the Doctor. A man who could change his face. And he took me away from home in his magical machine. He showed me the whole of time and space. I thought it would never end.
Little Rose Tyler, just a shop girl... who became The Bad Wolf, Destroyer of the Daleks.
And the same goes for Martha and Donna of course:
Martha Jones, the Legend, who walked the Earth.
And Donna Noble...
The Doctor: I want you to know that there are worlds out there, safe in the sky, because of her. That there are people living in the light, singing songs of Donna Noble, a thousand million light-years away... they will never forget her.
If you see the Doctor in this light, it throws a new light on the Specials - the Doctor rejected his primary purpose, and thus went astray. Or... you could say that by continually trying to make him the hero, RTD was removing him from his traditional role. (Again, I don't have a problem with RTD doing this. I thought it was brilliant TV.)
But! Talking of archetypes, then I some time ago came across this fantastic meta, which I have cherished deeply since. It held forth that the Doctor was a 'Trickster' figure, described thusly:
I especially like the character because he is often *not* the protagonist or hero, but the other fellow--the catalyst or outsider whose unexpected arrival and unpredictable behavior turn the world upside down and get the story rolling. And sometimes even tell the story.
Trickster is not just one of the most entertaining and fascinating characters in myth and fiction, he is also the one who plucks the strings of Story, makes music out of words, and sets the world resonating.
Now I was wondering whether to just summarise the following, but decided to just do a full copy and paste. Because this just floored me when I first read it. And it was written way before the good Doctor returned to our screens:
Trickster interests me most when he steps out of myth and into fiction. There, he does not always stick to the strict definition he has in myth. There are partial Tricksters all over fiction, and sometimes they are not easy to spot. They are usually marked by certain traditional attributes:
1. Motley's the only wear. They like colorful and ragged clothing, patchwork, flamboyant dress (e.g., fancy hats).
2. A rare facility with language; a tendency to speak in poetry, rhyme, puns, and codes. (Hyde writes at length about Trickster's "encoding mind" and its relation to poetic language.) Also, often, a connection to music--Hermes invents the lyre, Jester wears bells, the Pied Piper has his flute.
3. Quick wits, agile body. Trickster is always one step ahead of whatever game is going. He is a schemer, a plotter, a riddler. Similarly, he is good at sleight of hand; nimble, an acrobat, a tumbler.
4. Sometimes a fool and a bungler, sometimes mad (e.g., Tom o'Bedlam) or delirious.
5. Jokes and pranks. Laughter, both lighthearted and malicious, is Trickster's hallmark. He is whimsical and witty and charming. This is part of what makes him seductive and dangerous.
6. Masks and shape-shifting; transvestism and androgyny. Multiple names. Since Trickster is the god of ambiguity, he is also prone to changing his appearance (one reason for the colorful garb). Together with this goes duplicity, doubleness, switching sides, playing both ends against the middle.
7. Orientation toward the world and its structures is skewed--natural structures, such as gravity, gender, relationship to time (e.g., he is sometimes ageless, sometimes can fly, sometimes can give birth--these are especially common tropes in the commedia character of Harlequin).
8. Magic. Trickster often has magical powers or, in realistic settings such as some novels, a real-life equivalent: exceptional intuition or perceptiveness; or remarkable good luck; a habit of coincidences. If he is not always a god or avatar (Hermes, Loki, Krishna, Mercury), he may be touched by the gods. He is close to fate, chance, luck, and lives by them. His madness, recklessness, whimsy, and carelessness are also divinely inspired--unless they are inspired by the Devil.
Of course the Doctor is the Doctor, and transcends any pinning down, or rigid typecasting. But don't tell me that every. single. point on that list doesn't fit him to a T...
10. SAME MAN, DIFFERENT TIME.
I was wondering how to finish off, but this seemed a good way. Again with the subheadings (because I like them):
a) Different time.
Ten and Eleven are in many ways polar opposites, and nothing illustrates it better than these two vids. Try to watching Handlebars immediately followed by Let It Fall. In the former it’s All About The Doctor (Look at me! Look at me!), in the latter it’s all about other people, and the pain of saying goodbye (I find it so hard to let you go)... You may experience profound disorientation by the way.
b) Same man.
And yet... and yet, it's the same man. Everything Ten was informs what Eleven becomes. And would you know it, there's a lovely vid that explores the continuity:
Redemption: It's our last chance to forgive ourselves...
THE DOCTOR IN THE TARDIS... NEXT STOP: EVERYWHERE.
Because this post is all about Ten and Eleven and power. (And related topics, such as their place in the universe and whether this has changed with a new head writer and how god-like they are etc. Did I mention that I ramble?)
Disclaimer: Whenever I compare something, I’m not saying that one is better than the other. I love Ten HUGELY, and wouldn’t want him any different, and ditto for Eleven. Nor am I saying that I am right, just that this is how I see things, and I love how the character of the Doctor has grown and changed. Same man, different time. That’s the key for me. (Gorgeous, gorgeous banner made for me by kathyh - because I wanted those words illustrated, and she then distracted me hugely with Teh Pretty... Also thanks to owlsie for the podcast, and (since we share a brain) about half of this belongs to promethia_tenk. Don't ask me which half though.)
OK, first of all topaz_eyes’s comment in full. I shall then pull things out of it, in order to argue with discuss the finer points. (The stuff in italics is her quoting my previous comment.)
Yep yep. The story's the thing. And yep, Eleven is about looking outwards, back into a sense of place in the cosmos.
RTD is the one who keeps bringing in the Doctor as a God-like figure, whereas Moffat firmly pulls him down to earth.
That's interesting, because I see them in a completely opposite light. I think it's because I agree with green_maia's observation: in the RTD-verse, the universe is bigger than the Doctor, while in the Moffat-verse, the Doctor is bigger than the universe. RTD cast the Doctor as a god-like figure, yes--and then he deconstructed the concept. (E.g., I don't think it was coincidence that when the Doctor was portrayed as the most god-like, he was also portrayed as the most monstrous.) Nine stated in "Boom Town": "Don't worship me - I'd make a very bad God." Ten's run proved why that statement was true. By the end of "Waters of Mars," the Doctor was left as powerless as the rest of humanity.
So far, I'm not convinced--yet--that Moffat has pulled Eleven down to earth. (This is why I'm looking forward to S6.) As I see it, Eleven's not portrayed as God-like, but as a wizard. He's a kindly, old, wise wizard, but he's still cast as a magical archetype first. The whole concept of "Time can be rewritten" means the power to shape and reshape universes, seemingly without limits, according to how one deems it should be. Eleven has this power. That seems like a true god-like power to me...
Storytellers as gods. Absolutely. *g*
Just because a story isn't real, doesn't mean it can't be true. That's how magic works in Moffat's world.
Yup. To me, that's a magical concept, because one has to believe the story is true in the absence of proof that it is true. Which kinda contradicts atheism, as I understand it, anyway.
Well then, let’s go to work - I’ve decided to divide the meta up into subsections in order to keep my different points manageable. Because I am wordy. topaz_eyes comments in italics.
1. I’M A TIMELORD, NOT A HUMAN BEING. I WALK IN ETERNITY.
Now to me, these two statements are in direct opposition:
a) And yep, Eleven is about looking outwards, back into a sense of place in the cosmos.
b) in the RTD-verse, the universe is bigger than the Doctor, while in the Moffat-verse, the Doctor is bigger than the universe.
I remember reading that post of Maia’s where she put forward that theory and whilst it’s something I can get my head around when I concentrate, it never lasts, and every time I come across it I go ‘Huh?’ all over again.
For me, the narrative plays a huge part in how I see the shows and the characters, and (as has been stated repeatedly) in Rusty’s Who the Doctor is the main character, the protagonist, the one whose eyes we see the world through. The universe is important because of how it relates to the Doctor. He fights against it and its laws in Waters of Mars (“The Laws of Time are mine and they will obey me!”), and he rails against it in End of Time (“It’s not fair!”) - as if somehow the universe was sentient and out to get him. Yes it’s bigger than him, obviously, but it’s like a character in its own right. An enemy that the Doctor tries to defeat and control (something which is of course impossible).
Eleven on the other hand (thanks to having been Ten, me thinks) accepts that certain things are unfixable, that the world is big and uncontrollable. (“Life is a pile of good things and bad things.”) When he says goodbye to little Amelia he is sad, but resigned, and leaves his fate to the memory of a young girl… He can rewrite the whole universe, but he can’t save himself. That to me speaks volumes.
Looking at what I’ve written, then maybe I can see your point after all. Except I can’t see how Moffat makes the Doctor bigger than the universe… All he does is put things back where they belong - the universe is once again nothing more than matter that can be manipulated, not a foe to defeat.
Actually, having thought about it some more, then I think it comes down to difference of writing. RTD (being RTD) tackles the god thing head on - you have a character with god-like powers, so he takes it to extremes. How far can it go? How far can he go? What can and can’t he do? Etc.
Moffat does something else, something which is integral to the idea of the Doctor in the first place - it’s a difference of perspective, of seeing the world ‘as the gods see it’... The ancient Greeks considered comedy (the gods' view of life) as superior to tragedy (the merely human). This (or the opposite POV, rather) is actually examined in the brilliant Marble House, wherein the vidder criticises the Doctor (the Tenth Doctor at the time) very harshly for meddling in the affairs of humanity and then just moving on, looking for something new and shiny, as the world suffers. I find this an interesting topic (and one I’ve written about in the past), but to be honest the only thing the Doctor can do is move on.
This is where his alienness comes into play - he is a creature with a far longer lifespan than most others, and because of that sees the world through very different eyes. Ten tried to be human (in his outlook) and a god (in his actions) and neither worked. (I’m drawing heavily on this meta by sensiblecat btw) When Eleven comes round he has the sense to see that he can only be what he is. And yes, that involves some distance, and the use of a perspective that humans can’t grasp.
There is a very good (although relentlessly bleak, because it deals with the Doctor's loneliness) Ten vid ( New Dawn Fades) which starts out with the perfect example of this non-human perspective: The TARDIS goes from Earth’s very beginning, to the present day, to the moment the world is finally destroyed - all in the matter of seconds. That’s how the Doctor sees everything. He even comments on it in the second of the ‘Meanwhile in the TARDIS’ mini episodes. The end and the beginning and middle - it's all the same to him.
But this perspective does not make him a god. It makes him a Timelord:
ROSE: I can see everything. All that is... all that was... all that ever could be.
[The Doctor stands up abruptly, looking down at her as if suddenly, he understands]
THE DOCTOR: That's what I see. All the time. And doesn't it drive you mad?
ROSE: My head...
THE DOCTOR: Come here.
ROSE: ... it's killing me...
THE DOCTOR: Some things are fixed, some things are in flux. Pompeii is fixed.
DONNA: How do you know which is which?
THE DOCTOR: Because that's how I see the universe. Every waking second, I can see what is, what was... what could be, what must not. That's the burden of the Time Lord, Donna.
Now Eleven wears this burden far more lightly than Ten, harking back to the Classic!Who Doctors. Best described by this quote (From this article):
Oddly, in trying to describe this element of "Doctorness," I keep coming back to the idea of age. Though the Doctor may be 450-ish, or nearly 1,000, depending on the story, Tom Baker's Doctor was mind-numbingly old. Eternally young of spirit, perhaps, but he fairly dripped of being old. Old even well beyond whatever his age might be. The kind of age that comes with having seen the Universe in a way mere humans could never really comprehend. Partially a wisdom and experience that allowed The Doctor to look at events from a different perspective, but more than that. It was some kind of specifically ancient sensibility that ruled out the possibility of urgency. Baker's Doctor was often distracted in the most intense moments, simply because of this unique perspective of events, and even when running somehow managed to seem like he didn't really mean it.
Personally then I like the alienness. (I still remember being impatient when watching 'Rose' for the very first time - Rose was nice and all, but I'd been promised an alien, y'know?) I'm not bothered about powers as such, but about the way in which he is just different. (Hence my deep and abiding love for 'The Lodger'.) Seeing all of history at once plays into his difference, and the way he behaves. There is a lovely moment in 'Dreamland' (a cartoon set during the Specials era) wherein the nice alien (a grey) wants to destroy the nasty aliens (Viperox) since they go around obliterating planets, the grey's included - and the Doctor says no. Not because the Viperox don't deserve it, but because with time they'll evolve into a peace-loving species. (Of course there's also the thing about not committing genocide!) But it touches on how righting one wrong could undo other rights. It's a balance, and the Doctor's role (as a Timelord, seeing the whole picture), is to preserve history. How many times does he arrive somewhere and start investigating because something is wrong? (The technology is too advanced/not advanced enough is a common one.)
It's not about *control*, but ensuring the smooth running/unfolding of history.
2. BUT DOTH SUFFER A SEA-CHANGE INTO SOMETHING RICH AND STRANGE.
Or, I can illustrate the Ten/Eleven differences with water imagery. (See kaffyr’s Time and Tide meta.) Ten tried to fight the water (time), but water always wins. What Eleven begins to (re-)learn is that he needs to follow the water. See the way he (eventually) gets rid of the angels in Flesh and Stone. Winning the day isn’t about defeating the enemy, about being bigger and stronger and forcing a surrender - it’s about finding the key to everything, the point about which everything pivots, and change that. Go with the water, not against it, and the water will do the work for you. (This is also where River is so significant symbolically. But that’s another post.)
In my mind, one of the clear distinctions between Ten and Eleven is in the imagery. Ten I associate with fire:
LATIMER: “He's like fire and ice and rage. He's like the night, and the storm in the heart of the sun.”
~
MARTHA: 'Cause you know the Doctor, he's wonderful, he's brilliant, but he's like fire -- stand to close and people get burned.
He’s wonderful, but dangerous - think of the flames leaping around him as he kills the Rachnoss, or as he finally breaks down on Mars. I often think of him as being like a sun - burning up, and then becoming like a black hole, causing everything to fall into him. And water - time - is his natural enemy. He drowns in the Turn Left parallel world. And on Mars a single drop is enough to kill you…
Eleven, OTOH is borne out of fire and water, emerging - drenched to the skin - out of his glowing TARDIS in Amelia’s garden, and joyfully leaping back in when he sets off. It takes him a while to get used to it, to learn how to swim in the tides of time once more, but he gets there.
(Water imagery is everywhere in Moffat's Who, but that too is a different post.)
3. THE DOCTOR IN THE TARDIS DOESN’T KNOW.
So far, I'm not convinced--yet--that Moffat has pulled Eleven down to earth.
This is another point where I get all baffled, so first of all I’m going to talk about how often the Doctor is wrong in S5, because IMHO that season is in many ways a catalogue of Eleven stumbling, and needing others in order to save the say. And (mostly) his wrongness is not just in the details, but in fundamentally misunderstanding the situations:
- He is twelve years late for Amy. Unlike most companions whom he rather sweeps off their feet, with Amy he has to fight for her trust every step of the way - the whole season is about him trying to make up for that first accident and try to put Amy back together after accidentally breaking her. He saves the world with a supreme confidence, but then he has done that many, many times before. Trying to save a broken child - now that’s something else. Moffat doesn’t focus on the big picture, but the tiny miniature. (Notice how the finale centers around 4 people in a museum at the end of the universe. No big battles. No armies. A single Dalek thrown in to keep everyone on their toes. The whole of the drama comes from the characters.)
- He is wrong about the starwhale. His own issues blind him to the truth and he almost commits an atrocious crime. Amy saves the day.
- He falls into the Dalek’s trap (twice) and the Daleks win. They played him perfectly, and Earth was almost destroyed as a consequence (plus, now they’re out there once more…). And all because he lost his temper. Again, Amy is the one to find the key to saving the day. (And the ways in which the Doctor equals life with pain speaks VOLUMES about how much of Ten there’s still left inside.)
- He is dangerously wrong about the angels, and almost gets Amy killed. (River is the one who saves her. After the Doctor told her that the teleport couldn’t be fixed. Good thing River doesn’t listen.) Not to mention all the clerics who get eaten by the crack. And all because the Doctor made a fatal mistake.
- Through the Dream Lord the Doctor’s darkness is shown as malicious and manipulative and very dangerous.
- His curiosity about the crack [in]directly leads to Rory’s death.
- He almost blows up the planet in The Lodger, quite simply by being who he is. If it hadn’t been for Craig and Sophie the solar system would have gone supernova.
- He falls into the Alliance’s trap (hook, line and sinker), and if it hadn’t been for plastic!Rory surviving, and managing to stay ‘human’, the universe would actually have ended for good.
- He re-writes Kazran, and yet it is Abigail’s singing which eventually saves the day, because the Doctor ends up re-writing him too much.
As far as I can see he is consistently shown as bumbling along as best he can, and half the time his involvement makes things worse… He is almost painfully fallible, IMHO. If Ten needed companions in order not to go off the rails, then Eleven needs them in order not to do something *stupid*, or to stop him getting distracted at the critical moment.
Coming at it from a more Doylist perspective, however, Moffat is consistently the one who refuses to put the Doctor on a pedestal - or rather, he doesn’t let the Doctor’s Companions put him on a pedestal, something which Rusty’s have a tendency to do. And this is quite deliberate on Rusty’s part. Two excerpts from The Writer’s Tale to illustrate my point. The first one is about Penny, the Companion who never was since Catherine Tate agreed to come back as Donna. But this was what could have been:
Last night as I lay in bed I found myself thinking, Penny should be jilted. In Scene 1. Leaving her raw and open for a dazzling Time Lord to enter her life.
In the second one he's talking about writing the scene between Donna and Wilf (at that point Geoff) up on the hill, Donna waiting for the Doctor. And this is how he was thinking of ending it:
Donna: "Yeah. That's what I'm gonna do. If I have to wait a hundred years. I'll find him."
Geoff (laughing): "God help him."
Donna: "Oh yes!"
I'm not sure about the last couple of lines. I thought Donna's big speech was a bit too 'written', so those two little grace-note lines take the edge off it. It's more natural now. Less pretentious. It was too Disney before, and now it's more me. Plus, it's nice to see them laughing. Laughing in the dark. But I still might go back to the original, because Disney is good and I'm worried that the throwaway laughter undercuts the drama of a woman dreaming of the Doctor. I don't know.
‘The drama of a woman dreaming of the Doctor’. <- pedestal. (And that is *Donna*, the one without a romantic investment… The one who'd declared that the Doctor 'scared her to death'.)
This is worlds away from ‘Twelve years and four psychiatrists’. Or to quote a scene that will apparently turn up in S6 (but really, no spoilers at all):
Amy tells Rory off for leaving the Doctor on his own, and Rory says, 'Well, he's a Time Lord, he'll be fine." And she looks at Rory with infinite compassion and says, 'Rory, it's just what they're called. it doesn't mean he actually knows what he's doing.'
I’m also reminded of the podcast for ‘Forest of the Dead’ (with RTD, Moffat and DT - it's a complete and utter lovefest) where Moffat talks about the moment where River whispers the Doctor’s name in his ear.
Moffat: And I have to say, David, I think your performance in this is astonishing. There are two bits that are brilliant. It’s this, where you’re just flung back to being a man - you’re just an ordinary bloke for a minute - and this bit here where you shoulder the Doctor again… There we are, the mask back on!
RTD: You see how much the Doctor is-
Moffat: -is surface.
RTD: -a pose.
(Please do not think that I’m putting Rusty down. I might have a few issues with how he lets companions view him, but this is ameliorated by the suspicion that there’s nothing Rusty would love more than for the Doctor to sweep him off his feet… <3)
Or, to quote snowgrouse, who really summed up this whole section in a few lines:
I've discovered the main difference between Ten and Eleven (or, well, Rusty's and Moff's ways of writing the Doctor, really). Observe:
Ten: "I. AM. AMAZING!" *Does something amazing, poses proudly*
Rose: *licks teeth*
Martha: *gazes longingly*
Donna: "Harrumph."
Whereas...
"Eleven: Just watch this, c'mon, you'll see, I am ama--" *falls on his arse*
Amy: *facepalm*
QED ;)
4. THE LONELY GOD.
Nine stated in "Boom Town": "Don't worship me - I'd make a very bad God."
This is a very offhand remark (and such a Dotor-y line!), and one that’s very true! The god theme is revisited again in the S1 finale where the Dalek emperor declares himself god, and the Doctor given the title of ‘Heathen’. I’m not really going to go into all that, but it’s certainly a strong theme, including Rose’s god-powers from absorbing the vortex, with which she destroys the Daleks and creates immortal!Jack. Nothing much to do with the Doctor though, apart from that one line. (As far as I recall.)
But Ten, however, is given the title in the very first episode of S2:
NOVICE HAME : It's said he'll talk to a wanderer. To the man without a home. The lonely God.
It comes back in S3 - first in Gridlock, where Ten holds on to his Lonely God status:
MARTHA: But what did he mean, the Face of Boe? "You're not alone."
THE DOCTOR: I don't know.
MARTHA: You've got me. Is that what he meant?
THE DOCTOR: I don't think so. Sorry.
And again in the Family of Blood episodes:
LATIMER: Because...I've seen him. He's...like fire and ice and rage. He's like the night and the storm in the heart of the 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.
(Interestingly, after The Big Bang, the Doctor does burn at the centre of time. But he’s not ‘forever’ - that would be godhood proper.)
BAINES: He never raised his voice. That was the worst thing. The fury of the Time Lord. And then we discovered why. Why this Doctor, who had fought with gods and demons, why he'd run away from us and hidden--he was being kind.
Ten, very much, is made in the mould of an Old Testament god - ‘wrath’ is a word that fits entirely too well with his actions when he is angry. And the punishment is truly horrific and god-like:
BAINES: We wanted to live forever, so the Doctor made sure that we did.
Then of course there is the S3 finale and Tinkerbell!Doctor who saves the world because people believe in him.
In S4 we have a ton of prophecies, he and Donna become ‘household gods’ for the family they save from Pompeii, not to mention the DoctorDonna (‘the threefold man’ - VERY thinly veiled Trinity reference there, Rusty).
The prophecy theme is continued in the Specials both in regards to the Doctor’s death, and when it comes to the fate of the Timelords.
Surely I don’t have to talk about Waters of Mars and the Doctor’s ‘I can do anything!’, right? The Timelord Victorious is Ten claiming godlike powers, followed by a refusal to accept his impeding death (standing in the TARDIS, wondering whether to follow Oood Sigma... and then: "No!") - something echoed in End of Time, and Rassilon’s plan:
Rassilon: On your knees, mankind!
[…]
Rassilon: We will ascend! To become creatures of consciousness alone. Free of these bodies. Free of time and cause and effect. And where creation itself ceases to be!
Pure godhood, right there. That is what Timelords are capable of being. The Doctor’s fear of death taken to its utmost extreme. He rejects it (again), but the parallels between the Doctor’s rage in the face of death (“But me! I could do so much more! And it’s not fair!”) mirrors Rassilon’s very closely. (“I. Will. Not. Die!”)
Godhood is one of the central themes to RTD’s Who (the flipside to the human aspect), and if the Doctor ultimately fails in his war against fate and the universe, then it’s because he is not ready to go the whole way. (Because he’s the Doctor and not actually insane. When it comes down to it, he’s always the man who’ll die rather than watching others suffer.)
5. AND THEY WILL OBEY ME.
By the end of "Waters of Mars," the Doctor was left as powerless as the rest of humanity.
Was he really?
I can’t for a minute accept that he couldn’t have gone back in time by a couple of minutes, snuck in the back of Adelaide’s house and stopped her from killing herself. (He could have made the shot miss so it’d still ring out in the street, preserving the timeline).
His reaction to Adelaide’s suicide is ‘I’ve gone too far!’ - a truly painful wake-up call to what he's become (a person he truly admires *killed* herself because of him). He thinks Ood Sigma is a harbinger of his death. (And we see how swiftly his mind jumps from Adelaide, and towards himself...) Yes RTD does somewhat deconstruct the God thing as regards the Doctor himself, but there is still that overwhelming sense of something out there - the Doctor expects some kind of punishment in return for his actions. For a man who professes to be an atheist, that’s… interesting. (I mean the Doctor, not Rusty, although for an atheist writer to put that in, is certainly something to make a note of.) Anyway, the Doctor’s fate turns out to be in his own hands, and the prophecies self-fulfilling (if he’d not run away from his death, he wouldn’t have died.)
The god-theme is so tightly woven in that it’s hard to escape, and Ten is more and more ‘The Lonely God’ as time goes on - he even holds his regeneration at bay for far, far too long, to the end trying to defy nature. (He’s stubborn, bless him. Which is one of the reasons I love him so. And I adore the god-theme btw. It was what first made me fall for the show properly, and from then on meta would never leave me alone. As it happens there is a vid all about the Doctor's god-like qualities: Agnus Dei.)
But, if Rusty suddenly had a Damascene conversion, I’d not be in the least surprised. (Ditto Dawkins.) When you go make something you don’t believe in central to what you do, it’s bound to make people wonder.
And we see Ten offered Godhood very early on in his life. The central threat of 'School Reunion' comes from the Krillitane trying to crack The Skasis Paradigm:
The Doctor: The... God-maker. The universal theory. Crack that equation and you've got control of the building blocks of the universe. Time and space and matter, yours to control.
And the Doctor is offered that power:
MR FINCH: The Paradigm gives us power, but you could give us wisdom. Become a God. At my side. Imagine what you could do -- think of the civilizations you could save. Perganon, Assinta... your own people, Doctor. Standing tall. The Time Lords... reborn.
THE DOCTOR: I could save everyone...
MR FINCH: Yes.
THE DOCTOR (whispers): I could stop the war...
He is brought back from the brink, partly because of Sarah Jane reminding him that loss and pain are an important part of life, but he is very, very tempted. Power and control (especially the power to stop the pain) was always Ten's weakness. And the danger was that these were *not* beyond him... ( I think a full-out Time Lord meltdown would bring down galaxies and that's always lurking just below the surface with this Doctor). If he truly was as helpless as a human, then the tension in the story would be of a very different kind - RTD told that story with Jack and Torchwood. (Also see Above and Below, which parallels and contrasts the Doctor and Jack.)
6. I AM DEFINITELY A MAD MAN WITH A BOX
Now, I am actually struggling to think of anything God-related in S5 apart from this quote (which is a denial of it):
RIVER: Where do I come from? Your world has visitors. You're all Barbarians now.
COMMANDER: What is that? Tell me, what?
RIVER: A fool would say, the work of the gods. But you've been a soldier too long to believe there are gods watching over us. There is, however, a man. And tonight he's going to need your help.
Otherwise, it’s just not there. (He threatens now and again, but never from that specific vantage point.) Well, there's the Pandorica speech, but apart from admiring the sheer balls of the man, that moment is all smoke and mirrors (and well the Doctor knows it). It’s the most beautiful example of this (again from the Forest of the Dead podcast):
Moffat: It’s the interesting thing about the Doctor, isn’t it? What is it that’s special about him? In terms of writing him he’s not faster or stronger, actually. He can regenerate, which is pretty cool, but not all the time... and he’s superclever, but actually the people he’s up against are superclever, so it’s not that. I think it’s almost the power of the greatest gob in the universe - he can sort of talk his way, confidently, past anybody
DT: Which he slightly abuses there because he’s been slightly undermined. He shouts too loudly and is a bit nasty to the team…
Moff: But look - they’re all confident in him now. [umming awing] He’s almost a charlatan - in a good cause! - he poses, doesn’t he? He makes it seem like he’s this god-like creature, and he kinda, really, there’s just a bloke under there.
RTD: Oh absolutely.
Moff: Which I think makes him great fun to write.
The end of 'The Pandorica Opens' is Victory of the Daleks all over again. Because when it comes down to it, his enemies can quite simply grab hold of him and lock him up…
Of course there's the fact that he reboots the universe, but I honestly had to be reminded of it - it's not presented as god-like, just as The Solution To Fixing The Problem. Something which is foreshadowed in 'Flesh and Stone':
RIVER: That time energy, what's it going to do?
DOCTOR: Er, keep eating.
RIVER: How do we stop it?
DOCTOR: Feed it.
RIVER: Feed it what?
DOCTOR: A big complicated space-time event should shut it up for a while.
RIVER: Like what, for instance?
DOCTOR (shouts): Like *me*, for instance!
Come The Big Bang the problem is so immense that the Doctor barely blinks at the price he has to pay. Someone else could have done it, since it doesn't require a Timelord to carry out the plan, but he *would* have needed to be handcuffed in order for anyone else to take his place (see River sacrificing herself in 'Forest of the Dead' in his stead) - not to mention that he is half dead already, thanks to the Dalek. And - he's doing it for Amy. This is the framework within which his sacrifice is presented:
And old man dies. A young girl lives. Fair trade.
Eleven is 'a mad man with a box', be it the TARDIS or the Pandorica - not a god. Of course that doesn't mean that he can't be dark. From a recent interview with the Moff himself:
“There’s some extraordinary stuff coming from Matt this year. When he goes dark - the Doctor should never be that dark, he’s not a dark man - but when he goes dark it’s properly tingly, properly exciting. We’re certainly seeing sides of him and parts of his behaviour and some of his heart that we haven’t seen in the previous year.”
His darkness is of a very different kind than Ten's. We saw part of it with the Dream Lord, and there's a moment in the trailer for S6 which I've talked about before:
Unknown enemy: "Fear me. I've killed hundreds of Time Lords."
The Doctor: "Fear me. I've killed all of them."
Eleven has a wonderful way of being quietly threatening, but there is a certain eye-roll factor to the way he delivers the line. I can pretty much hear him thinking: "Oh you're evil, I get it. My ex-boyfriend was like that all the time! It's neither big nor clever, so just stop it already."
He can stand up to anyone, especially if he has something specific to fight for ("Leaving is good - never coming back is better."/"I'm sorry you're dead, Bob, but I swear to whatever is left of you, they will be sorrier."/"Because you didn't remember her name."), but otherwise he couldn't care less what people think, and - much like Nine - would certainly reject any attempt at placing Godhood on his shoulders. Way too much responsibility and gravitas associated with it for his tastes. ;)
7. TIME CAN BE REWRITTEN.
The whole concept of "Time can be rewritten" means the power to shape and reshape universes, seemingly without limits, according to how one deems it should be. Eleven has this power. That seems like a true god-like power to me...
This is another one of those times where I have to scratch my head, because the Doctor is the Doctor is the Doctor. Eleven does not suddenly acquire this new and godlike power after he regenerates. He’s a Timelord, rewriting time is an inherent ability. (The clue is in the name…) What Eleven does, the other Doctors (and Timelords), could, and did, do. Quite a lot, actually. The only difference is perspective, or narrative voice, or presentation, or focus, or word choice - whatever you want to call it. In essence, they’re the same:
- Going back to Classic!Who, then in ‘Genesis of the Daleks’ the Fourth Doctor is instructed by the Timelords to interfere in the creation of the Daleks on the planet Skaro in order to avert a future time where Daleks would dominate the universe. Of course, things do not go to plan:
The Doctor: If someone who knew the future, pointed out a child to you and told you that that child would grow up totally evil, to be a ruthless dictator who would destroy millions of lives... could you then kill that child?
Sarah: We're talking about the Daleks. The most evil creatures ever invented. You must destroy them. You must complete your mission for the Time Lords!
The Doctor: Do I have the right? Simply touch one wire against the other and that's it. The Daleks cease to exist. Hundreds of millions of people, thousands of generations can live without fear... in peace, and never even know the word "Dalek".
Sarah: Then why wait? If it was a disease or some sort of bacteria you were destroying, you wouldn't hesitate.
The Doctor: 'But if I kill. Wipe out a whole intelligent life form, then I become like them. I'd be no better than the Daleks.
The Doctor’s problem isn’t with the idea of rewriting time, but with the outcome, and what his actions would turn him into. We see Nine struggling with the same kind of dilemma in ‘Parting of the Ways’, and reaching the same decision.
- In New!Who, then as early as ‘Father’s Day’, Rose’s life gets rewritten (the hit-and-run driver, who ends up not running, and the young girl who stayed by her father’s side...)
- Ten rewrites not just Harriet Jones’ life, but the history of Britain with six words. Because she pissed him off. (Makes Eleven’s rewriting of Kazran seem positively plodding, and his motives - saving Amy, Rory and the 4000 other people on the spaceship - pure as the driven snow.)
- From ‘The Runaway Bride’:
DONNA: Wish we had a time machine. Then we could go back and get it right.
THE DOCTOR: ... Yeah, yeah. But... even if I did, I couldn't go back on someone's personal timeline. Apparently.
Oh Doctor. Trying to break the laws of time to get Rose back…
- From ‘The Shakespeare Code’:
MARTHA: The thing is, though... am I missing something here? The world didn’t end in 1599. It just didn’t. Look at me - I’m living proof.
THE DOCTOR: Oh, how to explain the mechanics of the infinite temporal flux? I know! 'Back to the Future'! It’s like 'Back to the Future'!
MARTHA: The film?
THE DOCTOR: No, the novelisation. Yes, the film. Marty McFly goes back and changes history.
MARTHA: And he starts fading away. Oh my God, am I gonna fade?
THE DOCTOR: You and the entire future of the human race. It ends right now in 1599 if we don’t stop it.
Rewriting time can be fatally easy. And in the wrong hands…
- In ‘The Last of the Timelords’ the Master and the Doctor have the following exchange:
DOCTOR: But you're changing history. Not just Earth, the entire universe.
MASTER: I'm a Time Lord. I have that right.
DOCTOR: But even then, why come all this way just to destroy?
This is one of my favouritest conversations from all of DW ever. The Doctor believes that the Master is wrong to re-write history the way he is - yet he agrees that as Timelords they have, not just the power, but the right to ‘to shape and reshape universes, seemingly without limits, according to how one deems it should be’...
- The idea crops up again in the Library episodes:
RIVER: If you die here, it'll mean I've never met you.
DOCTOR: Time can be rewritten.
RIVER: Not those times. Not one line! Don't you dare!
‘Time can be rewritten’. A statement of fact. By Ten. And he would probably have done it too, if River hadn’t told him ‘No’ in no uncertain terms. (She knows him so well…)
- Ten rewrites Donna, in mere seconds. (“That version of Donna is dead”)
- Ten rewrites a fixed point in time, on Mars, with time itself fighting against him. (This only ever works for me if I think of time as water.)
- Ten rewrites history, as we hear at the beginning of 'End of Time': "Got married, that was a mistake. Good queen Bess and let me tell you, her nickname is no longer... ahem, anyway…"
If you can travel in time, you can rewrite it. Moffat likes the intricacies of this kind of story, so that’s what he writes. And has just as much right to do so (if not more so, as time travel is integral to the whole concept of the show) as Rusty had to make the Doctor 'a bleak, existential figure consumed by loss and despair'. (And how. *pets poor Ten*)
And... isn’t rewriting time/people what the Doctor does every time he interferes? It's even addressed in canon now and again. Some are grateful, despite everything:
REINETTE: It's the way it's always been. The monsters and the Doctor. It seems you cannot have one without the other.
ROSE: Tell me about it. (pause) The thing is... you weren't supposed to have either. Those creatures are messing with history. None of this was ever supposed to happen to you.
REINETTE (angrily): Supposed to happen? What does that mean? It happened, child. And I would not have it any other way. One may tolerate a world of demons for the sake of an angel.
And some are bitter:
JOAN: Answer me this, just one question. That's all. If the Doctor had never visited us, if he'd never chosen this place on a whim...would anyone here have died?
Now all this doesn't mean that the Doctor is 'in control' all the time, his relationship with River being the best example of the precarious nature of the life he leads. The whole issue about 'Spoilers' is their way of trying to somehow not unsettle the fragile balance they keep - any misstep and their whole history unravels.
AMY: You've got to go, you know you have. You've got all that stuff with River and that's all got to happen. You know you can't die here!
DOCTOR: Time can be re-written, it doesn't work like that.
But to summarise: The Doctor meddles. Always has, always will. And when he does, time is rewritten. (Plus, the day usually gets saved!)
8. TRUST ME.
‘Just because a story isn't real, doesn't mean it can't be true. That's how magic works in Moffat's world.’
Yup. To me, that's a magical concept, because one has to believe the story is true in the absence of proof that it is true. Which kinda contradicts atheism, as I understand it, anyway.
This one’s going to require subheadings.
a) Atheism, as far as I am aware, means a disbelief in God, specifically. And speaking of 'proof' then I would like to know how an atheist would *prove* that there is no God. I'm not about to argue whether God exists, I merely want to point out that both positions require faith. A godless universe is as much of a story as a created one - what you do is choose which story you feel has the most, or the most convincing, proof. [This is discussed at length in the comments. Please don't bring it up again.]
The moon landing for example is disbelieved by a great number of people, and huge swathes of science requires us to take it on trust - like the existence of dark matter for example. Not to mention history, all of which we have to take on trust. In most cases we weight the evidence, and declare it sufficient for us.
b) Stories can be true, even if they aren’t real. To use a handy example, consider Romeo and Juliet. They are not real. Their story is fiction. And yet their story, more than any other, has become a template for what love is, getting to the very heart of the truth about love. ETA: Or, as has been pointed out, a truth about love.
Also consider this story:
“My cousin Helen, who is in her 90s now, was in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II. She and a bunch of the girls in the ghetto had to do sewing each day. And if you were found with a book, it was an automatic death penalty. She had gotten hold of a copy of ‘Gone With the Wind’, and she would take three or four hours out of her sleeping time each night to read. And then, during the hour or so when they were sewing the next day, she would tell them all the story. These girls were risking certain death for a story. And when she told me that story herself, it actually made what I do feel more important. Because giving people stories is not a luxury. It’s actually one of the things that you live and die for.”
- Neil Gaiman
Stories can be worth dying for...
c) The Doctor is a story, and he knows this:
Mr Lux: And who is the Doctor?
River: The only story you'll ever tell - if you survive him.
~
DOCTOR: That's a fairy tale.
RIVER: (laughs) Oh, Doctor, aren't we all?
This again ties in with the fact that he's an inveterate liar. (And he's been a liar from Day 1. No really, the First Doctor lied through his teeth to get his own way!) Telling stories is his way of controlling the world, and how people see him:
THE DOCTOR: I lied to you, 'cause I liked it. I could pretend. Just for a bit, I could imagine they were still alive, underneath a burnt orange sky.
Even his name is a story, a title, an affectation. And what does he always say?
“Trust me, I’m the Doctor.”
Trust requires faith. Every time he turns up somewhere new, and starts saving the day, he asks that people trust him, often without the slightest hint of proof. This is an integral part of the whole show:
DONNA (fearfully): I can't do it.
THE DOCTOR (calmly): Trust me.
DONNA: Is that what you said to her? Your friend? The one you lost? Did she trust you?
THE DOCTOR: Yes, she did. And she is not dead. She is so alive. Now, jump!
A leap of faith there, quite literally! :) Is that magic?
Staying with RTD, then the S3 finale hinges on the whole *world* believing in Martha's story (which humanity has to take with no more proof than Martha's word).
But - the interesting thing about Moffat is that he tackles this issue head-on. "Trust me, I'm the Doctor!" Eleven says to Amelia - and then goes on to break that trust, showing how fallible he can be. (And then he spends the rest of the season showing her that he/his story is worth believing in after all...) Plus Angel Bob, devastatingly: "You told me my fear would keep me alive but I died afraid, in pain and alone. You made me trust you, and when it mattered, you let me down."
Going back to the magic of fairy tales, then there's the Pandorica - it's a fairy tale made real, literally.
I'm honestly not sure where I'm going with this. I just know that stories are important. Stories are like maps - they contain information to guide you through life, and even though the story isn't real, the wisdom it contains can be true.
(ETA: Also see: Stories We Tell Our Children.)
9. SPACE GANDALF. OR THE LITTLE GREEN ONE FROM STAR WARS.
As I see it, Eleven's not portrayed as God-like, but as a wizard. He's a kindly, old, wise wizard, but he's still cast as a magical archetype first.
I've already talked about re-writing time, but just wanted to briefly pull out the wizard comment, just to make sure that we are talking about the same thing. To go with both the examples that the Doctor himself gives, then they are mentors - the ones pushing their young charges to go out into the world and discover their destiny/who they are. And this, I think, is not something that's specific to Eleven - it's an inherently Doctor-y trait. Think of Luke Skywalker, or Bilbo or Frodo, and then compare to this speech by Rose:
ROSE: For the first nineteen years of my life, nothing happened. Nothing at all. Not ever. And then I met a man called the Doctor. A man who could change his face. And he took me away from home in his magical machine. He showed me the whole of time and space. I thought it would never end.
Little Rose Tyler, just a shop girl... who became The Bad Wolf, Destroyer of the Daleks.
And the same goes for Martha and Donna of course:
Martha Jones, the Legend, who walked the Earth.
And Donna Noble...
The Doctor: I want you to know that there are worlds out there, safe in the sky, because of her. That there are people living in the light, singing songs of Donna Noble, a thousand million light-years away... they will never forget her.
If you see the Doctor in this light, it throws a new light on the Specials - the Doctor rejected his primary purpose, and thus went astray. Or... you could say that by continually trying to make him the hero, RTD was removing him from his traditional role. (Again, I don't have a problem with RTD doing this. I thought it was brilliant TV.)
But! Talking of archetypes, then I some time ago came across this fantastic meta, which I have cherished deeply since. It held forth that the Doctor was a 'Trickster' figure, described thusly:
I especially like the character because he is often *not* the protagonist or hero, but the other fellow--the catalyst or outsider whose unexpected arrival and unpredictable behavior turn the world upside down and get the story rolling. And sometimes even tell the story.
Trickster is not just one of the most entertaining and fascinating characters in myth and fiction, he is also the one who plucks the strings of Story, makes music out of words, and sets the world resonating.
Now I was wondering whether to just summarise the following, but decided to just do a full copy and paste. Because this just floored me when I first read it. And it was written way before the good Doctor returned to our screens:
Trickster interests me most when he steps out of myth and into fiction. There, he does not always stick to the strict definition he has in myth. There are partial Tricksters all over fiction, and sometimes they are not easy to spot. They are usually marked by certain traditional attributes:
1. Motley's the only wear. They like colorful and ragged clothing, patchwork, flamboyant dress (e.g., fancy hats).
2. A rare facility with language; a tendency to speak in poetry, rhyme, puns, and codes. (Hyde writes at length about Trickster's "encoding mind" and its relation to poetic language.) Also, often, a connection to music--Hermes invents the lyre, Jester wears bells, the Pied Piper has his flute.
3. Quick wits, agile body. Trickster is always one step ahead of whatever game is going. He is a schemer, a plotter, a riddler. Similarly, he is good at sleight of hand; nimble, an acrobat, a tumbler.
4. Sometimes a fool and a bungler, sometimes mad (e.g., Tom o'Bedlam) or delirious.
5. Jokes and pranks. Laughter, both lighthearted and malicious, is Trickster's hallmark. He is whimsical and witty and charming. This is part of what makes him seductive and dangerous.
6. Masks and shape-shifting; transvestism and androgyny. Multiple names. Since Trickster is the god of ambiguity, he is also prone to changing his appearance (one reason for the colorful garb). Together with this goes duplicity, doubleness, switching sides, playing both ends against the middle.
7. Orientation toward the world and its structures is skewed--natural structures, such as gravity, gender, relationship to time (e.g., he is sometimes ageless, sometimes can fly, sometimes can give birth--these are especially common tropes in the commedia character of Harlequin).
8. Magic. Trickster often has magical powers or, in realistic settings such as some novels, a real-life equivalent: exceptional intuition or perceptiveness; or remarkable good luck; a habit of coincidences. If he is not always a god or avatar (Hermes, Loki, Krishna, Mercury), he may be touched by the gods. He is close to fate, chance, luck, and lives by them. His madness, recklessness, whimsy, and carelessness are also divinely inspired--unless they are inspired by the Devil.
Of course the Doctor is the Doctor, and transcends any pinning down, or rigid typecasting. But don't tell me that every. single. point on that list doesn't fit him to a T...
10. SAME MAN, DIFFERENT TIME.
I was wondering how to finish off, but this seemed a good way. Again with the subheadings (because I like them):
a) Different time.
Ten and Eleven are in many ways polar opposites, and nothing illustrates it better than these two vids. Try to watching Handlebars immediately followed by Let It Fall. In the former it’s All About The Doctor (Look at me! Look at me!), in the latter it’s all about other people, and the pain of saying goodbye (I find it so hard to let you go)... You may experience profound disorientation by the way.
b) Same man.
And yet... and yet, it's the same man. Everything Ten was informs what Eleven becomes. And would you know it, there's a lovely vid that explores the continuity:
Redemption: It's our last chance to forgive ourselves...
THE DOCTOR IN THE TARDIS... NEXT STOP: EVERYWHERE.