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| The Doctor receives memories of lives she never knew she had. |
Doctor Who fans were sent reeling this week by the series’ revelation that the Doctor is not a native of the planet Gallifrey after all but arrived there billions of years ago as a child refugee from another world, and her ability to regenerate (the process by which one actor playing the Doctor is replaced by another) was harnessed and given to the society that became the Time Lords.
The upshot of this is that the First Doctor as played by William Hartnell is not the first after all. There are many more incarnations prior to that cantankerous old man that the Doctor cannot remember ever being.
This new history, introduced to the series after 57 years, is dividing Doctor Who fandom. There are those who are thrilled by the latest development, and there are fans who see it as an insult to William Hartnell who helped create the original character, and to the writers who shaped the mythology that has now been debunked.
Like never before, the modern Doctor Whoseries has descended into soap opera. The Doctor finding out that she has many lives prior to the Hartnell incarnation is like Pamela in Dallas waking up to realise that all of the previous season, including the death of her husband Bobby, was all a dream. The storyliners rewrote the details of the previous season to fit the fact that actor Patrick Duffy was now back and Bobby never died.
This isn’t the first time Doctor Whowriters have felt the need to introduce new mysteries and suggest the character’s past contains much bigger hitherto unknown secrets.
In the late 1980s, script editor Andrew Cartmel believed that the Doctor had become a prosaic character who was no longer the hero of his own show. In order to put ‘the Who back into Doctor Who’ he decided the Doctor was much older than he claimed and part of an ancient Gallifreyan trinity of godlike rulers. Hints at this new secret were drip-fed through the final two seasons of the original series before it was cancelled by BBC bosses.
Why was it cancelled? There were several reasons, including lofty disinterest from BBC controllers, scheduling the series against highly popular ITV programmes like Coronation Street (apparently willing their own production to fail), underfunding, not allowing producer John Nathan-Turner to move on when he was clearly worn out by his overlong tenure, and the surreal direction many of the stories went in during its final iteration, the Sylvester McCoy era.
But, above all this, was the alienation of the ‘casual viewer’, those who dip in and out of the series from story to story.
For the first couple of decades, the mystery concerning the identity of the Doctor was presented subtly. The Doctor and his companions would arrive seemingly out of nowhere (the TARDIS having materialised in some discreet location). They would help a society in need, befriend key characters, help the underdog, overthrow the corrupt regime, and then leave without the story’s peripheral protagonists having learned a single thing about them.
A classic example of this is the 1977 Tom Baker story The Robots of Death where the Doctor and Leela depart without saying goodbye to anybody. They simply slip off back to the TARDIS, the adventure’s key characters left none the wiser as to who it was that had actually helped them. There was no need to ‘put the Who back into Doctor Who’ because it was intrinsic to the fabric of the programme.
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| The Doctor and Leela depart from this story without saying goodbye. |
But by the 1980s, more and more of the Doctor’s personal history had been unveiled. We knew that the Doctor was a Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey in the constellation of Kasterborous, that he was of the Prydonian chapter of the Gallifreyan academy, and that he could only regenerate 12 times. By its twentieth anniversary, the series was indulging in its own mythology with flashback sequences and returning villains.
This was all great for devoted fans who had grown up watching the programme. They loved the show referencing itself and let it be known in their literature. John Nathan-Turner indulged them and the series became more and more self-referential (and, indeed, self-reverential) which was brilliant for organised fandom, many of which loved to discuss continuity.
But it meant nothing to viewers who enjoyed Doctor Who but didn’t consider themselves hardcore fans.
The result was that the casual viewer lost interest and stopped watching. It had become a programme made exclusively for the obsessive fan following.
The situation peaked with 1986’s The Trial of a Time Lord in which the Sixth Doctor as played by Colin Baker was put on trial by his own people for breaking the Time Lord rule of non-intervention in the affairs of other worlds. Four adventures are presented across 14 episodes as evidence for and against the Doctor’s case, with the action sporadically interrupted by debates in the Time Lord courtroom.
It transpires that the Time Lords themselves are guilty of massive corruption and the trial is a bogus operation designed to condemn the Doctor, who was on the verge of discovering their appalling intergalactic deceit.
The final twist is that the court prosecutor is, in fact, an evil future incarnation of the Doctor himself, and the Time Lords are employing him to work against his previous selves with the promise of inheriting the Doctor’s remaining lives when he is executed (which, if he was, would create a paradox!).
Now, back then at age 16, as a devoted and somewhat obsessed fan, I loved all of this. But, it has to be said, the potential viewing audience at large did not. The serial’s peak audience figure was 4.9 million (the previous season averaged audiences of seven million). Doctor Who was now a programme being made just for its fans.
And not all the fans were in agreement with me. One 17-year-old Chris Chibnall was publicly critical of the baffling plot and felt the series wasn’t very good.
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| The Doctor and The Valeyard are revealed to be one and the same person. |
Attempts to remedy the situation included replacing the aloof, bombastic Colin Baker with the genuinely eccentric Sylvester McCoy, by getting away from the series’ complex mythology, and taking a fresh approach.
But this fresh approach took the form of surreal set pieces that the casual viewer could not relate to (Richard Briars as a possessed caretaker in an isolated tower block, alien mercenaries taking over a Butlin’s holiday camp, and a homicidal Bertie Bassett, to name a few).
When the Seventh Doctor was criticised for being a clown and too much of an established character, the decision was taken to give him new mysteries and secrets—again a direction that only interests the fans. The casual viewer doesn’t care about the great reveal that the Doctor is really the third part of an ancient Gallifreyan triumvirate. They just want solid stories told well.
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| The Seventh Doctor was revealed to be part of an ancient Gallifreyan trinity. |
And the same pattern is unfolding in the modern series. History is repeating itself.
When Doctor Who was revived in 2005, writer Russell T Davies understood the importance of appealing to the non-fan. His first season had one strand running right through, that of the ‘Bad Wolf’. It was something fans could latch onto but had no bearing on most of the stories until the season’s climax. Davies knew that if a story arc was more complicated than that, and a casual viewer missed an episode and then didn’t know what was going on when they came back, they would likely give up.
He held to this policy throughout his tenure, seeing out Christopher Eccleston in the title role and developing the whole of the David Tennant era. Viewing figures were consistently high throughout. I would often hear people say, ‘Did you watch Doctor Who on Saturday?’
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| The Doctor's companion Rose turns out to be the Bad Wolf. |
However, when Stephen Moffat took over as head writer and Matt Smith was cast as the Doctor, the plots became more complicated and more akin to fairy tale in style. In Smith’s second season, for example, the Doctor appears to be shot at point blank range and killed.
As the season unfolds, we learn that the Doctor’s romantic interest, a woman called River Song (played by Alex Kingston), is in fact the daughter of the Doctor’s companions, married couple Amy and Rory (Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill). Since she was conceived aboard the TARDIS, River has the ability to regenerate like a Time Lord. This means she has lived many times over, and was even, unbeknown to Amy and Rory, their best friend Mels during their teens.
And the Doctor’s death? In the season climax, about ten minutes before the end, it turns out that the Doctor that was killed was actually a shape changing robot piloted by a miniaturised crew. The ‘murder’ was a contrived deceit.
A friend of mine told me that her two sons, who were big fans of the series, loved sitting down with notepads and pens to analyse the plot and see how it relates to established continuity. But I suspect the audience at large had no idea what was going on, didn’t care about the characters, and many who stuck it out to the final episode felt cheated by the ending.
The most controversial move of the modern series, brought in by current show runner Chris Chibnall, is the casting of Jodie Whittaker as the Thirteenth Doctor. There is no basis in the classic series for a Time Lord changing gender during the regeneration process. Every time the Doctor was renewed, he emerged from the process as a male. His arch enemy The Master was always played by a male. The only female regeneration in the show, that of Romana, saw Mary Tamm turn into Lalla Ward.
In the aforementioned Trial of a Time Lord, the female Inquisitor (Lynda Bellingham) is addressed as ‘Madam Inquisitor’ and the prosecutor, the Valeyard (Michael Jayston) is ‘My Lord Valeyard’. So, there is no suggestion at all that Time Lord society is genderless. Quite the opposite.
The first gender change in the modern series occurred when The Master (John Simm) regenerated into The Mistress (Michelle Gomez) who then dubbed herself Missy. This was to prepare the audience for the big change in the Doctor some three years later, as Peter Capaldi was to turn into Jodie Whittaker.
In order to explain why the first twelve incarnations of the Doctor were all male, only for the thirteenth to be a female, it seems Chris Chibnall has concocted the latest storyline—that the Doctor has a past that includes many other female incarnations.
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| Jodie Whittaker emerges as Peter Capaldi's successor, following the Doctor's latest regeneration. |
I predict that, as in 1989 when the original series was cancelled, modern Doctor Who will become more and more insular to the point that it is only of interest to its obsessive fan base who love debating minutiae such as this.
Viewers in general are not interested in these major revelations. And those long-time devotees who cannot stomach the series’ history undergoing a massive rewrite to accommodate the new mythology will look elsewhere for their fix of Who.
Thankfully, for them, BBC Audio publishes a range known as Audio Originals—hour long prose stories read by a single voice (a different actor associated with the series on each release) set in the programme’s past.
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| The latest BBC Audio Original. |
Additionally, the BBC licenced Big FinishProductions make full cast audio dramas with movie style sound design, starring classic series Doctors like Tom Baker and Peter Davison, as well as the TV Movie Doctor, as played by Paul McGann. They perfectly capture the style and tone of their respective eras while telling brand new stories. I love them.
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| Paul McGann and Nicola Walker lead an all star cast in this Big Finish Production. |
Anyone who feels disillusioned by the current television series should check these out.
While devotees of Chibnall’s vision gag in expectation of Jodie Whittaker’s third series on television, Doctor Whoexists in so many forms now, there will be a version of it out there that appeals to you.
