Doctor Who and Philosophy

by Courtland Lewis

  Before the Doctor can come to terms with this seemingly rash decision to save Reinette, she surprises him with a way back to the future. Having preserved the original time window, that is, her childhood fireplace and mantle clock, she offers the Doctor a way back to Rose and the TARDIS. She sacrifices her desire to be with her “lonely angel” because she knows it’s the noble and right course to take. From her actions, the Doctor learns about love and personal sacrifice. Madame de Pompadour teaches him how to love selflessly and to be a better person because of this love.

  Critique of Gallifreyan Reason

  German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), who was one of the most pre-eminent philosophers to discuss morality and ethics in a detailed, scientific way, believed that people develop moral judgment in two ways: they learn how to be good from experience (what he calls “empirical philosophy”), and they know how to be good through a priori knowledge, that is, deductive logic or reason (what he calls “pure philosophy”).73 Kant further explained that “worth of character is shown only when someone does good, not from inclination, but from duty.” He distinguished between what he called a “hypothetical imperative,” or wanting to act in a certain way to achieve a moral end, and a “categorical imperative,” or acting in a certain way to attain the greater good because you “ought to regardless of the consequences.”74 Duty to others, to society often comes in conflict with personal desires, and the Doctor and Rose’s love for one another is no exception. In terms of Kant’s ethics, “love and similar attitudes such as friendship are in tension with morality. Love seems to impel one to be partial: to give greater weight to the interests of one’s beloved.”75

  Throughout her two Earth years of travel, Rose falls in love with this amazing man who takes her on great adventures and shows her a better way to live her life. She feels a deep attachment to him, more so than with any of her human boyfriends, like Adam Mitchell or even Mickey Smith. The Doctor means everything in the world to her. Gradually, their love binds them together, not only in their travels throughout the universe, but on the moral path. In turn, the path of goodness and duty to their fellow beings enriches their love for one another.

  As we see in each subsequent adventure, both the Doctor and Rose not only act out of duty as a result of their experiences together but because, as rational beings, each has an innate sense of right and wrong. Even though their many adventures have transformed their love into a shared goal of making the world a better place, it does so at a cost. Since their love for one another deepens over time, and since they’re bound together in that love, this attachment becomes a potential barrier to making the right choice when faced with a moral decision. The more the Doctor and Rose love each other, the greater the risk of experiencing personal loss if their love, according to Kant, comes into conflict with their moral duty. Kant’s moral theory, what in philosophical terms is called “deontology,” is based on the idea that we have the freedom, or “autonomy,” to choose between what we “ought” to do (what is “right” action) or what we “ought not” to do (what is “wrong” action), regardless of our personal desires or “inclinations.” Therefore, while their love helps to inform the Doctor’s and Rose’s individual sense of moral responsibility, it’s their love that ironically causes their eventual separation. The Doctor and Rose ultimately act out of their own sense of justice and not specifically out of their feelings for each other.

  Journal of Impossible Things

  The Doctor and Rose decide to face the ultimate moral choice when they take a stand against the Cybermen and the Daleks during the Battle of Canary Wharf, as poignantly depicted in “The Army of Ghosts” and “Doomsday.” When they learn that the Daleks have broken through a Rift in the space-time continuum—and the Cybermen from a parallel Earth happen to tag along—they choose to try to find a way to save both their world and the parallel world from these lethal foes and from the harmful effects of the Rift. In the chilling two-part episode “The Rise of the Cybermen” and “The Age of Steel” (2006), the Doctor, Rose, and Mickey first encounter these Cybermen when the TARDIS crashes on a world in a parallel universe. “Travel between parallel worlds is impossible,” the Doctor explains, “because the worlds were sealed off from each other when the Time Lords died.” This impossible happenstance leads to the eventual impossibility of their romantic relationship. They simply can’t be together because they each choose to risk their special bond with each other for the sake of the greater good, namely, to save humanity. This grave choice becomes their “categorical imperative.” They sacrifice their personal desires because this is what they “ought” to do; this is the right path for them to take.

  As the story of “Doomsday” reaches its heart-wrenching climax, Rose decides to help the Doctor destroy the Daleks and the Cybermen despite great personal risk. The Doctor tries to send Rose along with her mother and Mickey to the safety of “Pete’s World”—the parallel world on the other side of the Rift where Rose had previously met her alternate “father.” The Doctor wanted her and the others who were affected by “Void Stuff,” or the “background radiation” that a time traveler absorbs, to have a chance at life on the parallel Earth, even though it meant being separated from his beloved, as well as having to confront his own inner void of loneliness. Yet, Rose refuses to leave him to complete the dangerous task by himself; therefore, she uses one of the transmat devices to traverse the Void and to pop back into her world to help him. The Doctor must seal the Rift between the two worlds after sending the Daleks and Cybermen, who were also affected by the “Void Stuff,” back into “Hell.” He does so by using the Void Machine to open the breach in space-time. The machine, located in the Torchwood Tower, in the Canary Wharf section of London, has two levers that the Doctor and Rose must set in order to open the Rift. They each have to hold on to a special magnetic device attached to the wall of the Lever Room in order to not get sucked in to the “dead space” along with the deadly invaders.

  Unfortunately, the lever of the Void Machine nearest to Rose goes off-line, and she has to get it working or the Doctor’s plan will fail. She tenuously grasps the lever of the machine. If she doesn’t re-activate the machine, both worlds will be destroyed, one by the Daleks and the Cybermen and one by the harmful effects of “Void Stuff.” Despite this brave effort, her fingers slip free of the lever. Rose glances one last time at the Doctor, knowing that her life is over. In her eyes, though, the Doctor sees that what really frightens Rose isn’t dying but being separated from him. Suddenly, violently, the Void tears her away from the lever, from the Doctor, from her world. Only at the last possible second is she rescued by Pete Tyler, her “father” from the parallel Earth. Rose was spared from death but is severed from the love of her life. While it’s the Rift between parallel worlds that physically separates the Doctor and Rose, the philosophical rift between love and morality is what causes them to “be sealed off forever” from each other.

  Parting of the Ways

  Because of their sense of duty and their voluntary willingness to act for the sake of the greater good, the Doctor and Rose experience an unfathomable personal loss. As Kant sums up, they “perform the action [saving humanity], irrespective of all objects of the faculty of desire [their love for one another], and it is their sense of duty [their will to do good to keep their family, friends and the other people of the Earth safe that their] wills stand, so to speak, at a parting of the ways ... where every material principle [their personal desires] is taken away from [them].”76 Even when Rose finds a way to return to her home universe to help the Doctor save not only her Earth but all of reality from being exterminated by the Daleks in “The Stolen Earth” (2008) and “Journey’s End,” she and the Doctor can’t be together. The Doctor sends her and his half-human, half-Time Lord hybrid back to “Pete’s World,” because the New Doctor, who was “born in battle” and filled with anger and vengeance, mercilessly destroyed the entire Dalek race during the battle to save humanity from these ruthless killers. The Doctor
“told Rose that she was the only one who could make the New Doctor a better man, as she had before done with him,”77 when she convinced him not to kill the Dalek prisoner in the episode “Dalek” (2005). Thus, the lovely Rose and her New Doctor get to live out their lives together. Unlike the Doctor who can live for hundreds of years, and who ages at a completely different rate than that of humans, the hybrid Doctor has a human life span, has only one heart, and can’t regenerate. This New Doctor can also tell Rose what the other Doctor couldn’t: that he loves her. As actor David Tennant explains, the Doctor “sacrifices his relationship with Rose for the greater good. He ends up with nothing.... Again.”78

  Our Doctor, then, is left on his own by the conclusion of the story. Not only does he have to leave his current companion, Donna Noble, back on Earth but also once again loses Rose, the love of his life. Despite the impossible loneliness and loss he’ll have to once again endure, the Doctor lets Rose go in order for her to be safe and because it was the right thing to do. Consequently, the Doctor “feels the pain only someone with a morally good heart can feel very deeply.”79 Because he loves her, the Doctor knows that the personal sacrifice he suffered in order to save her and the people of Earth pales in comparison to his duty to the greater good, to the restoration of order in the universe. He made these difficult decisions regarding his companions “without wavering or even doubting” (p. 129) because, to do otherwise, he would fail to do his duty.

  Allons-y into the Starry Heavens

  A famous quote by Immanuel Kant eloquently epitomizes the Doctor’s ethical philosophy and guiding principles:Two things have filled my mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence: the starry havens above me and the moral law within me.” (Critique of Practical Reason, p. 133)

  The Doctor, despite sacrificing his great love and personal happiness, knows that he must strive to overcome the bitterness and despair that would bring down a lesser man. For he must continue to do what he as a Time Lord must do: travel through space and time, exploring the fantastic and brilliant universe and experiencing wondrous adventures in his TARDIS.

  16

  Should the Daleks Be Exterminated?

  ED WEBB and MARK WARDECKER

  The Daleks have been with the Doctor since the beginning. It was in Doctor Who’s very infancy, its second serial, that the First Doctor, William Hartnell, and his companions first encountered these aliens, so mutated that they must live within saltshaker-shaped metal carapaces for mobility and defense, on their war-torn and devastated home world of Skaro.

  These creatures, who quickly became the Doctor’s most popular nemesis, were at this time bent upon world domination by genocidally destroying their wartime enemies, the Thals. Since then, the Doctor has encountered the Daleks numerous times, while the Daleks have set their sights on dominating much more than just the planet Skaro. These confrontations include at least two occasions on which he must resolve the question of whether a genocidal species itself deserves to be wiped out. He reaches two different conclusions. The difference between the two highlights the warning the Daleks present to us.

  In the Doctor’s dilemma we find out more about humanity, and our own great potential for evil, than about either Time Lords or Daleks. The Daleks show us what we’re capable of becoming, when technology and social engineering aren’t tempered with humility and compassion—to urge the destruction of the Daleks is to say that we might deserve the same fate.

  The Dilemma

  In “Genesis of the Daleks” (1975), arguably one of the bleakest stories in Tom Baker’s tenure as the Fourth Doctor, the Daleks’ creator, Terry Nation, decided to re-write the story of their origin, presenting the Doctor with an acute dilemma. He’s commissioned by the Time Lords to go back to the moment of the Daleks’ origin and destroy them at birth. In Part 6 of the story, he’s in a position to destroy the hatchery in which Daleks are being grown. He pauses, before setting off the explosion, to explore with his human companion, Sarah Jane, the dilemma he faces.

  DOCTOR: Have I that right?

  SARAH JANE: To destroy the Daleks? You can’t doubt it.

  DOCTOR: But I do. You see, some things could be better with the Daleks. Many future worlds will become allies just because of their fear of the Daleks.

  The Doctor presents a classic conundrum of time-travel science fiction: if someone tells you that a baby will be a future dictator, causing mass misery, can you kill it? Sarah Jane’s answer is that this is no baby, these are the Daleks, “the most evil creatures ever invented. You must destroy them. You must complete your mission for the Time Lords.” The Doctor is unconvinced: “Do I have the right? ...” Sarah Jane argues: “If it were a disease or some sort of bacteria you were destroying you wouldn’t hesitate.” The Doctor is not swayed: “But if I kill, wipe out an intelligent life form, then I become like them. I’d be no better than the Daleks.”

  At this moment of truth, the Doctor is relieved of the decision by a dissident scientist who arrives with the news that the Daleks’ creator, Davros, has agreed to talks about ending the program. The Doctor is grateful, “more grateful than I can tell you,” to be relieved of his burden of decision (although it turns out to be a temporary reprieve). We shouldn’t let ourselves off this hook. Would we commit genocide to prevent future horrors, including future genocides?

  Only One Race Can Survive

  For the Daleks, this isn’t a dilemma at all. In “The Daleks” (1963), the wasted, fall-out irradiated surface of Skaro and the mutation of the Dals into the Daleks suggest a Cold War theme similar to that which dominated American science-fiction films of the 1950s and 1960s. But as Kim Newman points out, “a nation that had suffered the Blitz and the direct threat of Nazi invasion still harked back to World War II for its nightmares.”80

  Like the Nazis, the Daleks are bent on wiping out another people, the Thals. It was the warrior Thals that the philosopher Dals fought in the devastating “Neutronic War.” Following the war’s neutronic holocaust, the Thals evolved into a humanoid species of peaceful farmers, while the Dals retreated into their city and mutated into the Daleks. To survive, the technologically and scientifically superior Daleks built tank-like carapaces for themselves and lived off supplies hoarded within the city. It’s in these food stores that the Thals, facing limited supplies of arable land, are interested, while the Daleks are interested in procuring the anti-radiation drug that allows the Thals to live in the open.

  The Doctor’s granddaughter, Susan, is used as a dupe to retrieve the drug and lure the Thals to a summit with the Daleks. The Thals enter the city in order to bargain for provisions, and their leader, Temmosus, learns too late that there’s no negotiating with or appeasing the Daleks. It’s up to the Doctor’s companion, Ian, to convince the surviving Thals of the danger they face and that they must abandon their pacifism and fight.

  After testing the Thals’ anti-radiation drug on themselves with disastrous results, the Daleks realize they’ve mutated to the point where they can’t survive without high levels of background radiation and decide to detonate another, massive neutron bomb: “We do not have to adapt to the environment. We will change the environment to suit us.” When the Doctor is captured and learns of this plan, he rebukes the Daleks with “That’s sheer murder.” To which a Dalek replies, “No. Extermination.” For the Daleks, eliminating what they perceive as an inferior species isn’t “murder,” but a much less personal, more industrialized “extermination” of a pest. They’re motivated both by hatred of the other and by a will to survive that demands the removal of any potential threat.

  In the climactic battle the Daleks are all killed when their power supply is damaged. When one of the Daleks pleads with the Doctor to save them he replies, “Even if I wanted to, I don’t know how,” and in a pattern that will be repeated several times in such serials as “The Dalek Masterplan” (1965) and “Evil of the Daleks” (1967), the Daleks fall victim to their own scheme, while the Doctor need do no more than passively watch things
unfold.

  In their second appearance, “The Dalek Invasion of Earth” (1964), the comparison between the Daleks and the Nazis is much more explicit. In this serial the Daleks are occupying the Earth of 2164. Human beings have been enslaved and forced to labor in a mine which comprises the whole of Bedfordshire. Signs of occupation are everywhere. Daleks stridently proclaim again and again that “Resistance is useless” and that they “are masters of Earth.” They attempt to firebomb London, recalling the Blitz and the fire bombings of Axis cities such as Dresden and Tokyo. There’s an active Resistance, who attempt to sabotage the Dalek spaceship, and collaborators. Many humans have been turned into “Robomen” by the Daleks. But even some who haven’t been assimilated in this way collaborate with the occupiers, such as two women who turn over the Doctor’s companion, Barbara, and another Resistance member to the Daleks in return for food. The Daleks enslave and humiliate all of humanity for the Earth’s natural resources, planning to outfit the hollowed-out planet with an engine and use it as transportation. Afterwards, they intend to implement their final solution—the extermination of all humans. In the end, the Doctor prematurely triggers the explosive device the Daleks were going to use to hollow the Earth’s core and engineers a revolt of the Robomen, defeating the invaders and destroying their ship. The story presents few moral ambiguities—a classic tale of occupation and resistance.