a reconsideration of DOCTOR WHO
Recently I got persuaded into getting Netflix streaming, and so I’ve been watching DOCTOR WHO. The show, if you’re not familiar with it, is about the eponymous Doctor, a 900 year old “Time Lord” alien who travels all of space and time in his TARDIS spaceship/time machine, looking for adventure, wonder, and evils to fight. (The reason the TARDIS looks like a blue police box is because the ship’s “chameleon circuit” has been on the fritz since the 1960s.)
The Doctor is a heroic character – it is said that for an effective story, the protagonist must “protagonize”, and the Doctor is really good at protagonizing. That said, his character definitely has a darker edge. Before the current show started, he completely destroyed his old enemies, the Daleks. The Daleks were ruthless, technologically advanced aliens who believed themselves the pinnacle of evolution, and therefore devoted themselves to annihilating all other forms of life in the universe. The Doctor did something (what, it’s never quite explained) that completely destroyed the Daleks, but in the process, also killed all the other Time Lords.
So I always thought the Doctor saved the universe from the Daleks, but in the process, was willing to sacrifice the entirety of his own race.
Except I watched the final episodes of Series 4 last night, and it turns out the Time Lords had gotten just as bad as the Daleks. Fearing defeat, they prepared a plan called the “Ultimate Sanction”, which would completely destroy the universe and all life in it, while the Time Lords ascended to become timeless gods.
So in the end, the Doctor’s people had become just as bad as the Daleks, and it was to stop both of them that the Doctor wiped them out. Which is completely different than sacrificing his own people to stop the Daleks. And that puts the Doctor’s character in a different light – rather than ruthlessly sacrificing them to stop the Daleks, he turned against them to stop them from destroying the universe.
It’s a very interesting show – you don’t get that kind of complexity on STAR TREK!
-JM