The return of the Doctor to his rightful home at the BBC is cause for celebration amongst nerds and geeks of a great variety of nations and cultures. His seventeen-year absence has been felt by us all. I wasn't a huge fan of Dr. Who. It was just before my time, I think, but like many others I have fond memories of the the buck-toothed Tom Baker years (much of it written by Douglas Adams, by the way), and the mere sound of the TARDIS grinding its way through the space-time continuum does get my blood going. And, of course, I can vividly remember the first time I heard a Dalek scream "Ex-ter-mi-nate!" and how much the very appearance of one of those knobbly things made me want to hide behind the couch.
I find the The Doctor interesting for a lot of the same reasons I find someone like Superman or Spider-man interesting. He's been around for several generations now (the show started in 1964, if memory serves), and not only has show been through dozens of writers and the character been through (depending on how you count) nine different actors, but the continuity of the show itself takes those shifting actors into account. For those who don't know (and if you don't, how in the world did you stumble on this blog?), Time Lords get thirteen 'regenerations,' which means that they spontaneously regenerate into a new body every so often, possibly as a result of great physical trauma (I haven't figured that part out).
The upshot is that every couple of years there's a whole new actor with a whole new personality and a whole new character, but who is, never the less, the Doctor. Tom Baker, the guy with the dearstalker and the long scarf, is probably the best known, but some of the other actors have become pretty iconic, too.
What's interesting, and what it all has to do with superheroes, is the fact that the show has a built-in capacity to change with the time, update itself every few years, and conveniently avoid charges of being inconsistent. It maintains the slippery 'neverwhen' of comics, except relocated to England. There are bits of the mythology that can't change. For example, the TARDIS must be a mid-50s, British emergy police phone box, but that blue box is, by now, far more associated with the show than with 50s Bobby's.
After seventeen years, the new Doctor is a very different figure than the ones I knew. He's at more engaging, more energetic, and less aloof, but also far more apt to point out how alien he is, and how narrow human perception is. By the same token, his human companion, Rose (the ultimate British 'girl next door'), gets a lot more attention paid to her circumstances, the reality and difficulty of picking up and going on a time jaunt. By the fourth episode of this series, we already see the after effects of her dissapearance: a heart-broken mother, and an ex-boyfriend who's hassled by the police for a year because he's the prime suspect in her 'murder.'
These two things are related. On the one hand, we have a clear effort to put (for lack of a better word) domestic morality in a larger perspective. In sci-fi, references to 'human' morality almost always mean the morality of whatever culture produced the story. For American shows, it's American morality. For a British show, it's British morality. We can follow this trend down the line. Given that national/cultural perspective, the Doctor's almost constant call for understanding the alien 'Other,' for compassion where humans usually show violence, for reason and kindness where humans how fear is a metaphorical call for the viewer, British or otherwise, to extend that same compassion to the hum 'Others' among us. The Doctor's cosmic perspective is an example of the kind of global perspective we ought to adopt. It's not a measured, calculated plan. It doesn't call for a new British foreign policy. It's actually quite simplistic, but it's never the less quite a positive message.
On the other hand, we have great value placed on 'the local,' on Rose's life and her concerns. While it's all great fun to travel to the year 5,000,000 and witness the destruction of the Earth, her mum's putting up posters that say "Have you seen my daughter?" In conversation on the internet (hello, fellow goons), someone recently said that the perspective on this show has changed. Whereas, previously we always followed the Doctor through the various companions and adventures that he had, this show, if Billie Piper stays on the cast after Eccleston leaves, will actually follow the human girl, Rose, as the Doctor fades in and out of view. She's not quite the star, but she is our view into the Doctor's bizarre and frightening world.
One way or the other, cosmic/global or mundane local, this incarnation of Dr. Who focuses on, ironically, human experience in the context of events of galactic proportion. The tendancy in most big, flashy, science-fiction stories is to only do the latter. The good ones manage to do both, the mediocre ones do one well at the expense of the other, and the bad ones do neither.
Posted by orion at April 17, 2005 2:09 PM