Doctor Who and Philosophy

by Courtland Lewis

  She’s My Plus One

  Returning to Davros’s original accusation, is the Doctor responsible for the actions of his companions? To answer Davros, let’s look at why the Doctor has companions in the first place. Sometimes the Doctor simply needs help because he can’t succeed alone: “I am sorry,” he tells Martha in “Evolution of the Daleks,” “but you have to fight.” And, as we’re frequently reminded, he’s lonely. But let’s look at the deeper reasons.

  Aristotle lists a number of reasons why a virtuous person needs friends. Here are two: First, remaining virtuous is hard work. Having virtuous friends can help the virtuous person to practice his own virtue.133 Compassion isn’t the Doctor’s strongest virtue, and at times he seems to slip. His companions, filled with human compassion, can help keep him on the right track. Rose may fail to convince the Doctor to save Cassandra in “End of the World,” but she succeeds a few episodes later in “Dalek” (2005). Similarly, even Donna appears horrified by the grief of the Empress of the Racnoss, while the Doctor seems unmoved. By “Fires of Pompeii,” Donna is ready to insist that the Doctor show compassion, compelling him to rescue a family from the volcano. The Doctor, on the other hand, allows his companions to recognize their own potential for virtue and heroism. As Rose tells Donna in “Turn Left,” “You needed him to show you that you’re brilliant. He does that to everyone he touches.”

  In addition, the virtuous person must seek to better understand himself, and since observing others is easier than observing oneself, the virtuous person can study himself by studying his friends, “since a friend is another himself,” as Aristotle tells us. The virtuous person sees himself reflected in his friends, because he chooses friends who are like him. And this is precisely why the Doctor is responsible for what his companions do. When the Doctor’s clone briefly becomes his companion, this point is driven home. Not only are his companions frequently in a position to cause great harm and destruction thanks to him, but they’re also friends he’s chosen, lived with, and who reflect his own self back to him. Their actions are more than simply actions that he enabled; they are, in a sense, his own actions.

  We shouldn’t, perhaps, be too troubled by the tendency of some companions to sacrifice themselves for the Doctor, even though he wouldn’t approve. After all, it’s good to preserve yourself, and since your friend is another yourself, it’s good to preserve a friend. But since a friend isn’t literally yourself, and it’s even more noble to do things for others than for oneself, it’s especially noble to sacrifice oneself for a friend. This is particularly clear if we consider that, usually, the companions don’t simply sacrifice themselves for the Doctor: they sacrifice themselves for those lives that only the Doctor can save. On a virtue ethics approach, their self-sacrifice is right when it’s based on the right virtues. And we can grasp those virtues when we examine the companions’ willingness to kill in the Doctor’s name.

  I Am the Bad Wolf

  Genuine friendship requires equality between the friends: should two friends become unequal, their friendship may still survive, but, as Aristotle warns, “when one side is removed at a great distance—as a god is—then it is no longer possible.” The actions of the Doctor’s companions may be his own, since he’s opened their eyes to their abilities and virtues, and since he’s chosen them as his friends. But his actions can’t be theirs because they’re too far removed from him. No matter how close their friendship, he sees the world in a radically different way than their limited human perspective allows. Any human who acquires the Doctor’s knowledge will die unless that knowledge is removed, as we discover with Donna and Rose. The companions have their eyes opened to the great crises of interspecies relations, but lack the outlook and wisdom to act with the concern that governs the Doctor.

  What do they lack? First, they lack knowledge of which events are fixed and which may be changed. The Doctor, for example, can’t return to the Time War to save his people, and he’s hinted that this isn’t simply because it was time locked: it’s a fixed event. “Fixed” events are not events that can’t be changed, but are events that ought not to be changed. Those who don’t have a Time Lord’s knowledge of the universe are likely to make mistakes. Donna wants to warn the people of Pompeii; Rose attempts to save her father, and she brings Jack back to life. In the first case, her attempt clearly had disastrous consequences, but it’s not clear (to us) that bringing Jack back was wrong—though it had a consequence Rose hadn’t anticipated. “You can’t control life and death,” the Doctor tells her; but because neither she nor we can know why, Rose replies aptly: “But I can.” The Doctor is, perhaps, a good judge of wrong in such circumstances, but we aren’t.

  So is there a moral failing on the part of the companions that we mere humans can recognize? Let me briefly return to the Doctor’s own virtue. Concern—allowing each being to have a choice and making this choice the condition of whether or not it may rightly be punished—must be impartial. In my analogy, it requires seeing that both the interests of the human with the swatter and those of the fly are valuable. This is why the fly needs to be protected, but also why the human must be given a choice. Fully recognizing the importance of choice in the Whoniverse might require knowing the potentials that hang on each choice. But as Aristotle stressed, practical wisdom—knowledge of what things are valuable—isn’t enough for good action. One must also have virtue, or a disposition to act in ways that promote what is valuable. The Doctor’s human companions aren’t guided by concern; they’re guided by compassion, and compassion and concern can come into conflict. Concern requires impartiality; compassion doesn’t. Someone may be fully compassionate, yet show compassion only to certain individuals and not others. Compassion alone isn’t sufficient for either good moral action or sound judgment because compassion blinds impartiality.

  Compassion shouldn’t be the only virtue that guides action (nor should it be dominant), as the Doctor illustrates, because acting out of concern helps one avoid the pitfalls of compassion by taking the freedom of both sides into account. His companions, on the other hand, sometimes allow their compassion to cloud their moral judgment: Martha’s threat to use the Osterhagen key to destroy the Earth—to end the suffering of the human race; Jack’s threat to destroy the crucible—killing everyone on board; and Harriet Jones’s decision to destroy a retreating ship all involve crucial oversights because of their human limitations.

  Thus the problem, which I christen the “Bad Wolf Syndrome.” As the Bad Wolf, Rose is only an example—though a particularly outstanding one—of a more general failing. The companions travel with the Doctor and learn from him, but their humanity keeps them from having the knowledge and, more importantly (since they can acquire the knowledge at least briefly), the correct moral disposition, 134 to adjudicate conflicts in a way that recognizes each party’s ability to make choices regarding their futures and to take responsibility for those choices and actions. In fact, compassion will necessarily be skewed in this way, because it’s primarily directed at those who are suffering through no real fault of their own. So, unless it’s guided by a proper respect for choice, compassion will inevitably overlook the aggressor entirely in favor of the victim and this, as I’ve been arguing, is a moral error. If the Doctor’s companions are inevitably moved by compassion rather than concern because of their humanity, then the Bad Wolf Syndrome is inevitable: the Doctor won’t be able to train his companions to apply the virtue of concern properly.

  And now we can see why the Doctor is always running, as Davros asserted. His past is filled with choices, many of them terrible, and many of them shared with his companions.135 It’s bad enough that the Doctor must live with the knowledge of the suffering he has caused, but he must also know that those who’ve shared his choices shared them for the wrong reasons. He acts out of concern; they act out of compassion. Their judgment and their virtue are systematically distorted. Their actions are—because they are friends—his own actions. But they’re also not his actions, because their found
ation is morally misguided. Their heart is in the right place (“They’re only trying to help”), but their reasons aren’t.

  The Doctor abandons his companions and runs from them for the same reason he runs from his past—because their actions are his own and yet not his own. When he looks back—at Rose committing genocide, at Martha dressed as a soldier with a key to destroy the Earth, at Jack holding a warp star—he sees what he fears himself to be: a destroyer of worlds.

  EPISODE 5

  Brilliant! Fantastic! Molto Bene!

  Aesthetics in Doctor Who

  26

  The Horror of the Weeping Angels

  MICHELLE SAINT AND PETER A. FRENCH

  Don’t blink. Blink and you’re dead. Don’t turn your back. Don’t look away, and don’t blink.

  —TENTH DOCTOR (“Blink,” 2007)

  You don’t think of angels as scary do you? But these ones will send you behind the sofa in fear.

  —Gbjazz1, IMDB.com forums

  ... the brilliance of this episode was the way it upped the psychological terror. Your survival is entirely in your hands; all you have to do is not blink. And, eventually, everyone blinks.

  —MARCIA, “5 Creepiest, Scariest TV Monsters,” Popvultures.com

  “Blink” (2007) won the Hugo award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form, and was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Script. Its writer, Steven Moffat, won the British Academy of Film and Television Arts Craft and Cymru awards for best writer. It regularly sits atop the lists fans compile of both the most horrifying and the best episodes of the entire Doctor Who series.

  Anyone new to the show will undoubtedly be besieged: “You must watch the one with the statues, ‘Blink’—you simply must!” With such accolades from critics, fans, and even those otherwise unfamiliar with the Doctor Who universe, there can be no doubt—Episode 10 of Series 3, the episode entitled “Blink”, is a master-piece. One of the major reasons “Blink” receives such praise is what it successfully does to the viewer: it’s horrifying.

  The story centers on the exploits of Sally Sparrow, a young woman who has never met the Doctor and only interacts with him for a few brief moments. She’s a photographer, and we first meet her as she’s breaking into an old, abandoned house. As her attention is drawn to a wall with words barely visible behind peeling wallpaper, we notice, through a window behind her, a beautiful statue of a crying angel. Sally peels off the wallpaper in time to see that the words behind it are a message to her, telling her to duck. She does so, just in time to avoid being hit with a rock flying through the window—and just in time for us to notice that the beautiful statue has moved.

  The statue is one of the Weeping Angels. Any time one is seen, a Weeping Angel will appear as just a stone figure, carved into the shape of an angel, usually with its dainty hands covering its eyes as if it were weeping. When observed, they’re peaceful and lovely. But the Weeping Angels aren’t ordinary statues. Though they’re stone whenever observed, they’re capable of extremely quick movements whenever not observed. If you blink, a Weeping Angel will have silently come up beside you. All it takes is one blink for the Weeping Angels to touch you, no matter how far away they were. One touch from a Weeping Angel and you’re gone—in more ways than one.

  The Doctor explains that the Weeping Angels thrive by consuming all of the energy from the future lives of their victims. They then deposit their victims in a past time, not a time through which they’ve already lived. Their victims feel no pain and the rest of their lives are theirs to live as they’re able in their new temporal and spatial locations. The Doctor describes them as “the only psychopaths in the universe to kill you nicely.”136 Upon being touched by an angel, Sally’s friend, Kathy Nightingale, is transported to Hull of the 1920s, where she married, became a mother, and died peacefully. Billy, whom Sally meets but a few minutes before he’s a victim of the angels, is sent to 1969 London where he became a video producer, lives a normal lifespan, and then dies later the same day he meets Sally, whom he originally met before being touched by an angel.

  Reportedly, a large number of Doctor Who fans claim that “Blink” is horrifying to them and that the Weeping Angels are terrifying monsters. Why? The Weeping Angels are the sort of objects that might ornament a formal garden or be on display in a museum. They’re smooth stone, with (usually) tranquil expressions and lovely appearances—a far cry from disturbing or distressing objects. Unlike the Daleks, whose bodies result from grotesque genetic mutation and whose minds have been warped to hate, or the Cybermen that once were human beings but have been carved up to fit a metallic form, the Weeping Angels convey the impression of serenity, shyness, and beauty. Whereas the Daleks are constantly planning and scheming to destroy the human race, methodically hunting us down and exterminating us, and the Cybermen ceaselessly desire to force us into their half-dead conformity, the Weeping Angels aren’t a serious threat to depopulate the world of humans or even, it seems, to destroy their victims in the sense of physically mutilating and killing them.137

  Kathy Nightingale reveals in her letter to Sally that her fate in Hull was not an unhappy one, she managed to live a fulfilling life from 1918 on. Billy, when reunited with Sally after his life since the late 1960s is at peace with the direction his life took. Victims of the Weeping Angels suffer nothing like the torturous murders that both the Daleks and the Cybermen instigate. Why are these statues that don’t physically harm their victims considered to be among the most horrifying monsters encountered in Doctor Who? 138

  The attempt to answer that question calls for a foray into the nature of horror and the concept of a monster. A leading authority on issues relating to horror is Noël Carroll. His theory of the horrific will be the touchstone of our attempt to account for the horror and monstrosity of “Blink.”

  Carroll and Horror

  In The Philosophy of Horror, Carroll distinguishes between what he calls “natural horror” and “art-horror.”139 Natural horror is the emotion to which one refers by uttering a sentence such as, “The prospect of nuclear war is horrifying.” That’s a different kind of horror than experienced while watching a “slasher” movie of the Halloween sort. Carroll proposes we call the latter sort “art-horror.” As Carroll explains, art-horror is “the sense of the term ‘horror’ that occurs when, for example, in answer to the question ‘What kind of book is The Shining?’ we say a horror story” (p. 12).

  Even though the term, “art-horror,” may be unfamiliar, the concept it’s meant to capture is firmly embedded in our ordinary discourse. We recognize a distinction between that very grave emotion the prospect of nuclear war can cause and the spine-chilling feeling experienced when watching Frankenstein or Nightmare on Elm Street. We use the term “horror” in what follows, but we’re referring only to Carroll’s art-horror when doing so.

  According to Carroll, horror is an emotional response to a monster, where a monster is an entity that’s inexplicable by our current scientific knowledge, threatening, and impure. Monsters “are unnatural relative to a culture’s conceptual scheme of nature. They don’t fit the scheme; they violate it” (p. 34). They’re creatures from other planets or dark, secret and nasty places. They’re mysteries, menaces outside of the natural order of things. But, as Carroll notes, superheroes like Superman are unnatural and scientifically inexplicable; there’s more to a monster than the transgressing of scientific laws.

  What matters for horror, Carroll maintains, is that the unnatural entity in the story elicits a distinct emotional response, a mixture of both fear and disgust in the viewer (or reader). Horrific monsters are threatening, whether physically, “psychologically, morally, or socially” (p. 43). They’re destroyers, frightening in their capacity to harm. But even more than frightening on Carroll’s account, they must be disgusting. A horrific monster is something with which we humans don’t want to come in contact with—we recoil from them, feel nauseated by them, and want to avoid them even when the threat of harm from them is removed. Carroll not
es, “Monsters are identified as impure and unclean.... They’re not only quite dangerous but they also make one’s skin creep” (p. 23). So, a horrific monster, as opposed to just a dangerous character, must provoke disgust in the viewer.

  Monsters typically are bastardizations, belonging in more than one category of things; they straddle two categories, being wholly neither one nor the other, like the zombie who’s both living and dead, or the werewolf who’s both human and wild animal. Or the impurity of the monster may be revealed by the difficulty of categorization, it’s neither this nor that but something without firm definition. Its impurity might also be shown through the association with indisputably impure objects, such as a beautiful woman who lives with rotting corpses. What all horrific fictions have in common, according to Carroll, is the presence of some sort of monstrous being, which “is essentially a compound of danger and disgust” (p. 52). If “Blink” is horrifying, then, according to Carroll, it should be because the episode contains monsters that make us both frightened and disgusted. But do the monsters in “Blink” meet those criteria?