One of the many wonderful things about fandom is how varied it can be,
about how different people can have vastly different but equally
emphatic views about the same story, whether it would be a book, a film
or tv series. In Doctor Who’s case, it’ll be very difficult to find a
wider range of fandom. So many debates over so many little things: which
is better, classic series or new? Russell T Davies or Steven Moffat?
Colour or black and white? All these tiny things us fans debate
endlessly over, (so many in fact that Doctor Who Magazine has now made a
regular feature out of it,) but none as popular as, of course, the
really obvious: who’s the greatest Doctor?
However, having seen quite a few lists of how people rank their
favourite Doctors, while many are varied, it’s interesting to note how
similar a few of them are, for example the same group of 3 or 4 Doctors
holding the higher ranks for one group of people, an altogether
different set for another. And it got me thinking: how do we even define
who our favourite Doctors are in the first place? Oh yes, there’s the
first one, there’s your Doctor, but even then, he might not have
been the first one you watched. The first Doctor I watched was Pertwee,
and yet it was McGann a few years later who ultimately became my
Doctor. That only explains how we ranks our number 1 – what about the
rest? How do we decide which incarnations of our favourite Time Lord
rank higher than others?
Well, what it really comes down to is what we want from our main
character in the first place. And this lead me to think that maybe, just
maybe, fandom can, rather broadly, be broken down into two groups, and
it really depends on what part of the title they like more: the “Doctor”
or the “Who”?
Let’s have examine both.
The “Doctor”
To this group of fans, he’s the title character, therefore he’s centre
stage. He should always be the heroic figure, fighting against evil and
saving the world. Oh, his companions can have their own stories and save
the Doctor himself when things go wrong (as they often do), but
ultimately, he’s the main character, no one else. As a result, he should
be a fully rounded, three dimensional character. He should have quirks,
vulnerabilities, emotions, an easy character for the audience to relate
to on some level.
David’s Doctor was kind of the embodiment of this. He played the hero
who clearly had relationships that mattered to him, a past that haunted
him, a man who tried to act happy go lucky but was clearly living with a
great deal of grief and turmoil underneath. It’s not really surprising
that David’s Doctor was so popular: not only was he arguably one of the
best actors that the series ever had, but his Doctor was one that was
given extraordinary emotional range, something that he always excelled
at. At his best, his Doctor was the alien hero that you could not only
believe in but relate to. Even better: there were times when you’d take
one look at his face and know exactly what he was thinking.
The Doctor, ever the hero and always ultimately centre stage. Which is,
to one group of fans, how it should be. I mean, there’s a reason he’s
the title character, right?
Well, if the show was called “The Doctor”, that’d be a fairly accurate
summary of what the programme could be. But it’s not. It’s called
“Doctor Who”. Which leads me to the other viewpoint.
The “Who”
The second word in the title, and just as important as the first in
establishing an idea in some fans of whom the title character should
ultimately be. This is the belief that the character doesn’t necessarily
need to be someone you should ultimately be able to relate to, but
rather he should be a mystery to the audience, an enigma that should
always keep us guessing. To this side of the fanbase, he should be
viewed as alien in every single way, a man who’s not only clearly not
human, but has beliefs and morals that are ultimately different to ours,
whose thoughts we cannot begin to ultimately guess at.
In this group of fandom’s extreme view, he shouldn’t even be thought of
as a clear-cut hero: he should be someone who would not only make
decisions we wouldn’t agree with, but leave us wondering why he’d make
them in the first place. There are two excellent examples of this: the
first is William Hartnell’s Doctor in the very beginning of the series,
where arguably, he wasn’t the main character: it was the two
schoolteachers he had kidnapped, Ian and Barbara. To both them and the
audience, he wasn’t a man to be trusted, a man who would, as noted,
kidnap two innocent people just to protect his granddaughter in his own
twisted way. He wasn't the main character, but he was the main focus of attention for us, as we're ultimately left to guess and wonder who this ancient man really is.
The other example, of course, is the 7th Doctor. At first, he started
out as something of a bumbling clown, but as time went on, he started
becoming something of a manipulator, a man willing to play the grandest
games of chess with the deadliest and greatest evil the universe had to
offer, with even his companions being used as pawns. We got hints of
this darker, more mysterious character in the final 2 years of the
classic series, and it’s been greatly explored in the expanded universe,
such as the novels and audios. From a personal point of view, this is
one of my favourite incarnations of the Doctor, particularly in
television and audio. Sylvester McCoy might not be the greatest actor to
have played the role, but he always knew how to play the dark,
mysterious role just right.
What makes the “mystery” element of the Doctor so radically different to the “hero” element is the simple fact that he doesn’t need
to be the main character, or at least the main point of view, to be a
key presence in the show. Look at Blink: he’s hardly in it, and yet fans
love it, partly because of the weeping angels, but just as likely is
that he’s more of a background presence, a mysterious man talking out of
a tv set, and talking directly to you. In this case, he becomes less of a character and more of an idea, and it works equally well.
If we think about this conflict – about how radically different the hero
and the mystery aspects of the central character are – then this can
explain why there are such huge divides in fandom over many things, not
just over who’s the best Doctor, but even down to the RTD/Moffat debate,
as both can be taken as extreme examples of one aspect of the character
versus the other. This can explain why some hate the RTD era for making
the Doctor too human, while others hate the Moffat era for making the
companions the main focus at times, particularly in series 6.
So which viewpoint does fandom ultimately seem to prefer? Well, when it
comes right down to it, ideally a mixture of both. Most of us love
watching a classic heroic figure who knows what right and wrong is,
never gives up and fights for his friends. There’s so many dark
antiheroes out there in fiction that we need a character like that. Yet
equally, we enjoy a bit of mystery too, something to leave us wondering
how much we know about this man and how he would see the universe. Even
Tennant had his grand moments of mystery, with the greatest example of
course being Family of Blood – when we see the Doctor returned to his
old self after being human for so long, we’re once again reminded of
just how inhuman this man really is. Yes, ultimately, each of us has a
preference for one over the other – personally, as objective as I’ve
tried to make this analysis, I think it’s obvious I have a preference
for the "mysterious" Doctor – but ultimately, I think it works best as a
mixture, one that can give us so many wonderful stories from a truly
versatile series.
It is called “Doctor Who”, after all.
