The "Doctor" or the "Who"?

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.