Doctor Who and Philosophy

by Courtland Lewis

  This helps explain the Doctor’s uncertainty and anxiety about the outcome of regeneration, and the consequent ambiguity of his statements about the process. It helps explain, for example, how the Ninth Doctor in his final moments can regard regeneration both as a “way of cheating death” and as an occasion for sad goodbyes: the organism will survive, but the person might not. A parting of the ways in quite another sense.

  It also helps explain the oddness and inconsistency of the Doctor’s interactions with later incarnations. Initially, the First Doctor isn’t absolutely sure that the Third and Second Doctors are the same person as he is, because he isn’t sure that the thoughts of the dandy and the clown are psychologically continuous, or even that they’re psychologically connected, with his own. They might indeed be different persons, even though they’re all the same Time Lord.

  Love and Doctors

  The theory just outlined might’ve proved helpful in resolving a difficulty with the pivotal episode “Journey’s End” (2008). Zapped by a Dalek, the Doctor begins to regenerate, but stops the process by siphoning off the regenerative “energy” into the hand that was severed in a swordfight (“The Christmas Invasion”). Later, this energized hand “grows” a new body which outwardly resembles the Doctor’s in every detail, although inwardly having only one heart. This “new Doctor,” who we’ll call “Doctor Two,” shares all of the Doctor’s thoughts and memories, up to the point of the aborted regeneration.

  Now, the series had made clear Rose Tyler’s deep, romantic love for the Doctor. The Doctor had seemed to be in love with Rose too, despite regarding his Time Lord longevity as an insurmountable barrier to their relationship (“School Reunion”). Stranded in Pete’s World (“Doomsday”), Rose has moved heaven and earth to get back to the person she loves.

  At the end of “Journey’s End,” the Doctor returns Rose to Pete’s World. He tells her that she’s to stay there with Doctor Two, as he has committed genocide, and so is “too dangerous” to be left alone. Rose is to civilize him as she civilized the Doctor during their time together. While swayed somewhat by the fact that Doctor Two is able, as the Doctor wasn’t, to tell her that he loves her, and also by the fact that, since he has one heart and will age as she ages, he can commit himself to spending the rest of his life with her, Rose seems unconvinced.

  She’s right! The situation seems false and wrong. The episode’s writer, Russell T Davies, has acknowledged as much.99 Concerned that Rose is acting either out of character—she wouldn’t allow anyone to come between her and “her” Doctor—or stupidly, in not realizing what’s going on, Davies opted to re-write the scene so that, in his eyes at least, Rose actively chooses Doctor Two out of the kind of lust that the Doctor has shown himself unwilling or unable to satisfy.

  But surely if Rose chooses Doctor Two over the Doctor, and especially out of lust rather than love, we must conclude that she never loved the Doctor in the first place. Her upset in “Doomsday,” and subsequent attempts to get back to the Doctor, now appear as symptomatic of an immature infatuation, satisfiable by hooking up with a mere lookalike.

  So let’s turn to the amended Lockean theory of personal identity, and see how “Journey’s End” might have turned out. Doctor Two clearly has a different body from the Doctor’s. It’s a distinct parcel of matter. And the organism that sprouts from the severed hand is clearly a different organism, since it isn’t even a Time Lord organism. So, the Doctor and Doctor Two are two different men (if, indeed, we can use the term “man” of a Time Lord and a Time Lord-human hybrid). But we oughtn’t to infer from this that Doctor Two is a different person from Rose’s Doctor.

  Doctor Two shares all of the Doctor’s thoughts and experiences, up to the moment when he aborts his regeneration. He remembers these thoughts and experiences as his own. There’s very strong psychological continuity, in other words. If the original Doctor had died at or before the moment of Doctor Two’s creation, both Locke and Parfit would say that the Doctor, that very person, lives on, the same consciousness now associated with a newly created organism. As it is, the Doctor and Doctor Two exist simultaneously. Given this, and given in any case that there was a gap between the aborted regeneration and Doctor Two’s “birth,” there’s what Parfit calls “branching.” That is, Doctor Two’s thoughts and experiences branch off from the Doctor’s. There is fission, and a divergence. The Doctor and Doctor Two are two different persons.

  But, crucially, Doctor Two remembers, as his own (for they are his own), all of the Doctor’s thoughts about Rose, all of the experiences they had together, and all of the feelings that he has for her, up to the moment of that aborted regeneration. Then neither the Doctor nor Doctor Two has a better claim to be the same person, the very same Doctor, whom Rose knew and loved. Doctor Two is the person she met in the Henrick’s basement (“Rose”), and was cruelly separated from, and has been trying to get back to.

  This philosophical revelation yields a more subtle and satisfying denouement. Firstly, Rose is neither shallow nor stupid. She doesn’t settle for second best. She gets the person she fell in love with. And, as a bonus, he’s now able to spend the rest of his life with her, as she with him. Secondly, the very same person who experienced the heartbreak of losing Rose for the first time now experiences joy at the prospect of a lifetime in her company. In this full sense, the Doctor who lost, finally wins.

  Of course “our” Doctor—the consciousness associated with the Time Lord organism—loses Rose all over again. His sadness and sense of isolation continue for a little while longer.

  21

  What the World Needs Is ... a Doctor

  RUTH DELLER

  I’m the Doctor. I’m a Time Lord. I’m from the planet Gallifrey in the constellation of Kasterborous. I’m 903 years old and I’m the man who’s gonna save your lives and all six billion of the people on the planet below. You got a problem with that?

  —THE TENTH DOCTOR (“Voyage of the Damned,” 2007)

  Imagine a lonely god, the only one of his kind, who travels the world saving souls and bringing redemption. In his mission, he’s accompanied by a loyal band of followers, whose lives are so transformed from meeting him that they go on to do even greater things. Through him the whole universe is transformed ... but is he Jesus Christ, the New Testament Messiah, or the Doctor, a traveling television Time Lord?

  It’s easy to see parallels between Jesus Christ and the Doctor. Right-wing Christian lobby group Christian Voice certainly thought so when they protested against the scene in “Voyage of the Damned” where the Doctor ascended, flanked by robot angels on either side, claiming it portrayed him as a Messiah. Showrunner Russell T Davies has even stated that “The Doctor is a proper savior. He saves the world through the power of his mind and his passion.”100

  So what’s this savior Doctor like, and what do the apparent parallels with Christ reveal about him? The nineteenth-century philosopher Ludwig Andres Feuerbach101 claimed that mankind projected onto Jesus Christ the ideals it sought for itself. Thus Christ becomes the idealized human, the person we wish we could be. If we apply this notion to the Doctor, what ideals are projected onto him? Is he an idealized Christ figure, or something else? What can looking at the interactions between the Doctor, his companions, and his enemies reveal about human nature and the potential we have to become something better—or worse—than we are?

  That’s What You Do. You’re the Doctor. You Save People.

  Like the Biblical Jesus Christ, the Doctor is a savior. He saves individuals and worlds from peril, and often from their own ‘sins’ or misguided doctrines and actions. For example, in “Voyage of the Damned” he declares himself the one who will save all of the people in peril. Through the ‘prayer’ of millions chanting his name in “The Last of the Time Lords” (2007), he saves the world from the threat of the Master, and in “The Doctor’s Daughter” (2008), he urges the people of Messaline to form a new society and found it in his image.

  Like Jesus, the Doctor is also a
‘redeemer’. He makes people and worlds ‘better’. The testimony of his companions (or ‘disciples’) is that their lives are changed by meeting him. In “The Parting of the Ways” (2005), Rose tells Mickey that “it was a better life. And I—I don’t mean all the travelling and ... seeing aliens and spaceships and things—that don’t matter. The Doctor showed me a better way of living your life.” For Donna’s Granddad, Wilf, the tragedy of her mind being ‘wiped’ in “Journey’s End” (2008) was that she’d revert to being the person she was before meeting the Doctor, crying as he says, “but she was better with you.”

  It’s not just his allies who are ‘redeemed’ through their encounter with the Doctor. He also offers a second chance to his enemies, much as the Biblical Christ offers redemption for sinners. He allows Margaret, the Slitheen, to be reborn (“Boom Town,” 2005), tries to negotiate peace deals with the Sycorax (“The Christmas Invasion,” 2006) and Sontarans (“The Poison Sky,” 2008), and offers both the Master (“The Last of The Time Lords”) and Davros (“Journey’s End”) chances to come with him instead of perishing.

  As Jesus Christ offered “life in all its fullness” (John 10:10), the Doctor also offers a life of new possibilities. In “The Girl in the Fireplace” (2006), Reinette says, “I have seen the world inside your head, and know that all things are possible,” an echo of Christ’s words that with God “all things are possible” (Matthew 19: 26 and Mark 10: 27). River Song is so aware of the possibilities offered by life with the Doctor that she sacrifices herself in “Forest of the Dead” (2008), in order that the Doctor doesn’t die and therefore the wonderful times that her past self and his future self enjoyed together will still occur.

  Those who spend time with the Doctor are often changed so much by the experience and the new opportunities it’s given them that they carry on the work after these encounters, much as Jesus’s disciples and followers continued his work. We see the ‘mission’ carrying on through Sarah Jane with her child helpers in The Sarah Jane Adventures, Captain Jack and his Torchwood team, Martha and UNIT, Mickey and Rose in the parallel universe Torchwood, and even the likes of Mr. Cropper and Harriet Jones, who contribute to the Subwave Network used in “The Stolen Earth” (2008) to unite the Doctor and his companions.

  The Doctor’s allies also spread his ‘gospel’, or story, to those they meet, most notably in “Planet of the Ood” (2008), where the Ood sing songs of their liberator(s), Doctor-Donna, “The Fires of Pompeii” (2008) where the Doctor and Donna are worshipped as household gods, and “The Last of the Time Lords” (2007), when Martha spends a year traveling the world telling the story of the Doctor and urging people to believe: “But if Martha Jones became a legend, then that’s wrong because my name isn’t important. There’s someone else. The man who sent me out there. The man who told me to walk the Earth. His name is the Doctor. He has saved your lives so many times, and you never even knew he was there. He never stops. He never stays. He never asks to be thanked. But I’ve seen him. I know him. I love him. And I know what he can do.”

  However, unlike the Biblical Jesus, the Doctor is by no means flawless. If we take Feuerbach’s notion of people projecting what they want to see onto God, we see that atheist showrunner Russell T Davies has projected onto the Doctor not only the power and majesty of a god, but the problems that come with such status. Nicola Shindler, who worked with Davies on many of his earlier television projects, claimed that “Russell’s ideology” is that “the root of all evil is religion and gods, and that the world would be a better place without them.”102 There are certainly aspects of this ideology present throughout the series. It’s demonstrated in the villains who display god-like tendencies, such as the Master and his plan to rule the Earth (“The Sound of Drums,” 2007), Davros and his creation of a new race of Daleks from his own flesh (“The Stolen Earth”), Cassandra and her desire to be immortal (“End of the World,” 2005), and the Emperor Dalek and his worshippers (“Parting of the Ways”). However, it’s not just in the villains that the problem of ‘gods’ and power is revealed, but in the Doctor himself.

  There are many references to the Doctor as an ‘angel’ or a ‘lonely god’ throughout the series, yet he himself decries the idea that he might be seen as a deity: “Don’t worship me—I’d make a very bad God” (“Boom Town”). The fact that he’s like a god is also sometimes seen as a negative, as when Margaret chides him in “Boom Town”: “From what I’ve seen, your happy-go-lucky little life leaves devastation in its wake. Always moving on ’cos you dare not look back. Playing with so many people’s lives—you might as well be a god.”

  In “Dalek” (2005), the angry Doctor vows to exercise his power to “wipe every last stinking Dalek out of the sky” and in “The Runaway Bride,” he kills all the Empress of the Racnoss’s children, despite Donna’s pleas not to. In “The Fires of Pompeii” he tells Donna he can’t save people because it’ll damage the timeline of history, before coming to the dreadful realization that it was actually his presence that caused the eruption of Vesuvius. Likewise, in “The Family of Blood” (2007), Joan Redfern challenges him: “Answer me this, just one question. That’s all. If the Doctor had never visited us, if he’d never chosen this place on a whim ... would anyone here have died?” The Doctor, guilty, can’t answer her, and she dismisses him. Although we’ve never seen it, we also know that the Doctor killed in the Time War between the Daleks and Time Lords and bears the responsibility of those deaths on his shoulders.

  Even his enemies see that, like them, the Doctor has war and anger in his soul, and that his life leads to suffering. In “Journey’s End,” when Rose, Captain Jack, Martha, Mickey, Sarah Jane, and Jackie are all gleefully discussing how to destroy the Daleks, Davros addresses the Doctor and says his soul has been revealed through his ‘children’: “The man who abhors violence, never carrying a gun. But this is the truth, Doctor: you take ordinary people and you fashion them into weapons. Behold your Children of Time transformed into murderers. I made the Daleks, Doctor. You made this.”

  It’s also clear that the weight of being like a ‘god’, and particularly being the only one, isn’t easy for the Doctor to shoulder: “Because that’s how I see the universe. Every waking second, I can see what is, what was ... what could be, what must not. That’s the burden of the Time Lord, Donna. I’m the only one left.” (The Doctor, “Fires of Pompeii”).

  I’ll Tell You What I Can See.... Humans. Brilliant Humans

  When Feuerbach saw that humanity projected its ideal self and ideal moral core onto the notion of God, and particularly onto the person of Jesus Christ, he believed this was because we needed something to project our values onto to make us want to be ‘moral’. Other philosophers disagreed with this notion and thought that man could be moral without an idea of a god to follow or live up to. Friedrich Nietzsche, for example, believed that people were capable of modifying behavior and attitudes themselves to live up to a moral standard.

  Nietzsche argued that if humanity could live morally and, by self-improvement and self-restraint, overcome our baser instincts, we could so better ourselves that our old nature would be surpassed by what he calls the ‘Übermensch’. This is translated by some commentators as ‘superman’ or, more accurately, ‘overman’, and refers to a moral ideal that humanity should set itself. So, instead of projecting these values onto Christ or a notion of ‘God’, we should accept that ‘God is dead’ and attempt to become those who don’t overcome our ‘sin’ or weakness through a belief in a supernatural being (as the New Testament suggests), but who overcome ourselves and become something more than we once were.

  The idea that people can become moral and can better themselves without a god or religion can also be found within Doctor Who. Throughout the series the Doctor emphasizes the importance of ordinary people and their potential to become ‘special’. When Professor Lazarus changes his form in “The Lazarus Experiment” (2007), he says, “I’m more now than I was. More than just an ordinary human,” to which the Doct
or replies, “There’s no such thing as an ordinary human.” In “The Satan Pit” (2006), when facing the devil, the Doctor speaks of his belief in humanity, and in his companion Rose, as being superior to any notion of gods or deities: “’Cos I’ll tell you what I can see: humans. Brilliant humans.... I’ve seen a lot of this universe. I’ve seen fake gods and bad gods and demi gods and would-be gods—out of all that—out of that whole pantheon—if I believe in one thing... just one thing ... I believe in HER.”

  Sometimes the humans in the series are seen as more morally ‘correct’ than the Doctor. In “Partners in Crime” (2008), when the Doctor chooses not to kill the Adipose, Donna notices that this makes a change from him killing the Empress of the Racnoss and her children in “The Runaway Bride,” their encounter a year earlier. She remarks that time with companion Martha Jones must’ve done him good, and he agrees. The Doctor’s companions act as his moral compasses. This is perhaps most poignant in “The Fires of Pompeii,” Donna pleads tearfully with him to save someone (much as Abraham pleads with God for Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 18), and he eventually relents and rescues Quintus’s family. In “Journey’s End,” the Doctor leaves the ‘New Doctor’ with Rose after he commits genocide and wipes out the Daleks. Reminding Rose that in the episode “Dalek” he (the Ninth Doctor) was the one who wanted to destroy the Dalek and she stopped him, he says “That’s me. When we first met. And you made me better. And now you can do the same for him.”

  Throughout the series, it’s ‘ordinary’ men and women (be they human or alien) who help the Doctor to save the worlds, from his longstanding companions and allies who not only assist him, but carry on his mission, to the likes of River Song (“Forest of the Dead”), Jabe (“End of the World”), Luke Rattigan (“The Poison Sky”), Astrid Peth, and Bannakaffalatta (both in “Voyage of the Damned”), who sacrifice their lives for the sake of others. In all of these characters we see something of Nietzsche’s ‘Übermensch’ as they rise above their weaknesses to become something ‘better’.