Doctor Who and Philosophy

by Courtland Lewis

  The Daleks are evil because we recognize they were once better; they’re evil because they’re the future we dread. They were once capable of genuine emotion and real moral good. However, five hundred years after the bomb was dropped, they’ve ceased to be human. They’re what we might be like on the other side of Armageddon. Like the Morlocks, they’ve become trapped underground surrounded by machines. They’ve evolved or mutated into soulless brains who, for all their intellectual brilliance, are evil because they can no longer feel for their fellow creatures.

  Bunker Mentality or Love?

  The Doctor’s companion Ian sums up why the Daleks are evil: “They obviously think and act and feel in an entirely different way. They just aren’t human” (p. 109). The Daleks were once great and noble. They were once human, but the neutron bomb has remade the Daleks in its own image. The idea of the neutron bomb caused moral outrage in the early 1960s because of its appalling inhumanity. All nuclear weapons are horrifying, but there was something peculiarly callous about a bomb that targets people and not things. In this sense, the neutron bomb represented the triumph of technology and science over humanity.183 It’s this triumph that the Daleks embody, and it’s this that makes them evil.

  Nation’s view of evil is peculiarly apt for the nuclear age. The philosophical debate over why humans are good and evil can be traced back to ancient times. Rorty says that Socrates and Jesus, the two great ancient moralists, left us with two different answers. For Socrates, reason and knowledge make humans good. Jesus on the other hand preached love.184 Nation, like the atheist Rorty, sides with Jesus. The neutron bomb provides the final proof that reason and knowledge don’t necessarily lead to moral progress. The neutron bomb didn’t emerge from the sleep of reason, it was the product of some of the world’s finest minds. The Daleks, as I have argued, embody the bomb. They’re dominated by a bunker mentality: safe in their underground city they create a new neutron weapon and plot the total extermination of the Thals. The Daleks’ physical appearance sums this up. Each Dalek is a rational brain inside its own heavily armed bunker.

  The Daleks are also evil because they represent a nightmare human future. The Daleks are what we might become after the bombs fall. They’re the mutant survivors of an apocalyptic war who have been locked in a nuclear bunker for five hundred years. They’re sexless, heartless brains, shut up in machines incapable of intimacy; they’ve forgotten what it means to laugh and no longer think of themselves as individuals. We recognize them as evil because the Daleks have lost all that we hold most dear.

  But Nation also offers us a positive moral message. The Doctor and his companions remind us and the Thals of what it means to be good. Indeed, Ian presents us with a lesson on how to be a moral philosopher. Initially, the Thals are unwilling to stand up to the Daleks. But Ian teaches them a moral lesson. His appeal to reason fails. As a last resort he threatens to take one of the Thals to the Dalek city and exchange her for the TARDIS’s fluid link. Immediately, the Thals see that their friend’s life is more important than a piece of technology. They realize that there’s something special about the life of a friend. Ian’s appeal to their emotions works and the Thals learn that evil must be resisted. Again, this moral message chimes with Rorty’s philosophy. Moral progress, according to Rorty, is achieved through enlarging the moral imagination, not by increasing our stock of knowledge or by becoming ever more rational. Empathy is the key. We’re more likely to act well when we imagine what the world feels like from our enemy’s point of view; if we remember that our enemy, however different from us they may seem, is part of a community who’ll grieve if they’re harmed (p. 185). The Doctor makes a similar point. In response to his companion’s endless ethical debates he retorts, “[t]his is no time for morals. This is time for action!”185 The Doctor understands that doing the right thing is always more important than abstract moralizing. The Thals are good because they love each other. The Daleks don’t, and that’s why they’re evil.186

  Roger Bunce at BBC Television Centre some time in the 1970s

  30

  The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, Sponsored by TARDIS

  DEBORAH PLESS

  Man is, and always has been, a maker of gods. It has been the most serious and significant occupation of his sojourn in the world.

  —JOHN BURROUGHS, American essayist

  It may not be a popular topic, but man has been creating god for himself since before he could talk. We create gods to fill some inner lack and to give ourselves something or someone to emulate. Even more than this, though, is the human creation of heroes, mystical people slightly better than the rest of us, who can serve as intermediaries between our ideals and us, and in so doing, show us how to really live. This tradition may be thousands of years old, but never has it flourished so fantastically as in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, as television and movies gave culture the opportunity to create heroes on a massive scale.

  Given this new stage for heroics, once relegated to oral traditions and epic poetry, one would think that the world would become less unified, as everyone became free to choose their own hero. Yet this hasn’t happened. As time has progressed, we’ve seen several heroes become symbols for their nations, inspiring the people onward as the world grows darker. In America, this trend can be tracked by the popularity of different superheroes through the years. In Britain, though, the national hero has most decidedly been the Doctor, from Doctor Who.

  A Romantic Wanderer

  This is, of course, in direct conflict with the fact that the Doctor is an alien. John Fiske reconciles this fact by considering the Doctor as a character more than human, and only slightly less than divine: “The significance of the Doctor lies partly in his structured relationship to gods and man. He is an anomalous creature in that he is neither God (or Time Lord) nor man, but occupies a mediating category between the two. He has a nonhuman origin and many nonhuman abilities, yet a human form and many human characteristics.” 187 In other words, the Doctor is a compromise between the strength and power of a god and the ingenuity of man. It’s this balance itself that makes him the ideal.

  Tom Baker, the Fourth Doctor, and the one that best exemplified this ideal of the Doctor as Britain’s hero, refused to play the Doctor as some sort of silly man always flitting about, but rather insisted that he portray him as the “romantic wanderer.” Dressed in a large fedora, long coat, and trailing, rainbow scarf, Tom Baker simultaneously elevated the Doctor and also made him relatable. He became like a favorite uncle, the type of person one would like to be when one grew up. As June Hudson, who worked on the show during that time said, “The Doctor had always been the still center in a spinning world of aliens and monsters.”188 More than that, however, the Doctor was conceived from the start as an unconventional, non-patriarchal figure, a plan only marred slightly by time. Verity Lambert, Doctor Who’s first producer, always intended the Doctor to come off as utterly anti-establishment, like a child pointing out the ridiculous in the society.

  The History of Ordinary Events

  “After the travails of the immediate post-war years, British leaders had expected that the end of the decade would find them in calmer waters.... Hopes such as these were doomed. The new decade brought no relief and revival, but a further round of crises.”189 On first glance, post-World War II Britain doesn’t seem the most likely candidate for an upsurge in hope. In the years immediately following the war, Britain was faced with crises in its many colonies, leading in most cases to decolonialization, an unrestricted immigration policy, only rescinded when it became clear that the nation was practically bursting at the seams, and a dispute over the meaning of British citizenship itself, the foundation of the Empire. It was in these conditions that Britain began to dream of a better future.

  Immediately following the World War II, Britain gave India its independence, and split it from Pakistan, removing itself entirely from that section of the world. Though this was a blow to the Empire, Britain at this time st
ill ruled numerous countries in Africa and Asia. The majority of these territories became independent over the course of seven years, from 1957 to 1964, sometimes referred to as “Readjustment.” The Empire’s goal wasn’t so much to set the nations free, possibly out of a belated sense of duty or pride, as some have suggested, but generally for far more mundane concerns. As the years progressed, it became increasingly difficult for Britain, weakened by Germany’s sustained attacks during World War II, to maintain political control of its colonies. Most were released simply because they’d become too expensive to keep. Between 1960 and 1964 alone, seventeen of Britain’s colonies in Africa became independent, including most of the modern African powers. This rush for independence left Britain feeling gun-shy and weak; it was cut off from the resources it had been able to rely on for, in some cases, the past three-hundred years.

  The relationship between decolonization and Britain’s general decline in international prominence was not direct and uncomplicated. Both events, Britain’s loss of its colonies and its decline in the international sphere, were signs of a new era in British politics. Instead of being able to continue to rely on overwhelming power, both military and financial, Britain would have to act much more diplomatically for the foreseeable future.

  In the midst of the sudden rush of decolonization, Britain enacted a surprising piece of legislation that allowed unlimited immigration from its colonies. The purpose of the act was to encourage migration from the older colonies, such as Canada and Australia, but the effect was that for the fourteen years that this law remained in effect, citizens of the empire, primarily from Africa or Asian citizens living in Africa, poured into Britain. Begun in 1948, the law stayed on the books until 1962, when Parliament decided that it couldn’t handle any further immigration. Following this reversal, British immigration laws became overwhelmingly restrictive, and remain so to this day, only lightening slightly in the 1970s during the droughts and famines in Africa, to provide some relief to their former subjects.

  What’s remarkable in all of this, then, is the single piece of legislation that put it all into action: simply put, in 1948 Parliament declared that any citizen of the British Empire, was an equal citizen, whether one lived in London or Kenya. All people are one people. Though this law was later repealed, it left a lasting impression on the culture, evidenced by the relative harmony of multiculturalism in modern Britain. It also laid the foundation for a later citizenship law, one that would yet again make all citizens of Britain equal under the law.

  Preparing Britain and the World for Doctor Who

  All of these crises set the stage for 1963. They generated the cultural climate that created Doctor Who. Every question that these political events dealt with was later rehashed thematically on a science-fiction show, designed to exhibit the best of the British spirit. The frustrations of decolonization became the Doctor’s policy never to stick around and interfere after he was done saving a planet. The Doctor is a weary man, from a race of beings who were known for their wisdom, but who had created an empire too large for itself. The Doctor is strongly anti-imperial. Yet, while he’s rejecting his people’s empire, he can’t help but cling to his identity as one of them. The Doctor is continually identified as a Time Lord, forever branded as one of his race even as he rejected them. The Doctor represents what Britain hopes it can be: proudly British, while rejecting Britain’s exploitative past.

  Further developing Britain’s desire to see in the Doctor a resurrection of their old glory reformed for the new world, the Doctor became a diplomat. In “Creature from the Pit” (1979), the Doctor acts as an intermediary force between two cultures, not personally invested in the outcomes of his mediation, but morally obligated to help guide them to the light. One can easily see in this the beliefs of a Britain burned by direct involvement in international affairs, but still anxious that the world run as it should. Yet, inherent in this view of the Doctor as self, is a sort of denial of reality.

  The Britain of the mid-1970s and early 1980s wasn’t a world power any longer, though still a prominent nation. This disconnect is more aptly recognized in “The Sun-Makers” (1977) wherein the Doctor criticizes, and ultimately vanquishes, a Big Brother-like government, dominated by cameras. This fact stands in stark contrast to the simple truth that Britain has for many years had the most sophisticated CCTV system in the world. They employ more cameras to watch more areas of the nation than any other, with the intent to cut down on crime. This innocent hypocrisy seems only to reinforce the fact that the Doctor represents the nation that Britain wants to be, not the nation that it actually is.

  Despite all of this, though, the Doctor remains a true populist hero, as he was always intended to be. “Dr. Who [sic] wins his struggles not by superior technology (which in science fiction generally means superior force—technology is both totalitarian and imperialistic) but by reason, fearlessness, humor, and curiosity” (Fiske, p. 167). Rather than just trying to conquer the universe with his superior technology—and it is most decidedly superior, Doctor Who leaves the audience with no doubt that the Doctor could trounce his enemies with no trouble if he were to stop playing fair—the Doctor adheres to a strict moral code, one which always entails him defeating the cold, calculating science with “warm humane science,” and perpetuating liberal democracy. Moreover, the Doctor’s main function appears to be one of cleansing society of evil, an attribute that John Fiske claims to hint at the Doctor’s Christ-likeness, along with several other things:The intergalactic timelessness of the Doctor is not unlike the eternal heaven of Christ; his dislike of violence and his sexual abstinence are other shared characteristics, as is the fact that both are leaders. (Fiske, p. 180)

  The Doctor’s status as a possible Christ figure only serves to enhance his populist appeal.190 In addition to being a stand-in for the British nation, he’s genuinely someone that the British people can understand and desire to emulate.

  Appearing in the later years of Tom Baker’s time as the Doctor, Romana, played by Lalla Ward, came to signify the vision of the ideal British woman. Cheeky, yet refined, Romana was unfettered by the typical gender restraints. She was the Doctor’s equal in every way, sparring with him verbally and ideologically when they came to a disagreement. Where the Doctor’s companions prior to her had largely been attractive but stupid women, Lalla Ward was determined to make sure that Romana was easily identified as a modern woman. Even her style of dress was emphasized to make her visually recognizable as strong, especially notable in one episode where the Doctor and Romana encounter a Minotaur, Romana dressed elegantly in English hunting pinks: “The conventional relationship between helpless maid and ravening monster was thus inverted, with Romana becoming visually identifiable as a hunter—and a sportsman hunter at that.”191 More than this, though, with the Doctor’s quirks and tendencies associated with traditionally feminine roles, Romana was left free to become the more masculine side of the pair, adopting a more brusque attitude and cold, reasoning intelligence. While the Doctor used intuition to guide him, and reaped all the creative benefits of that, Romana used logic.

  The Doctor and Romana at all times act in an idealized way: they’re the way that the British, at that time, wished they could be. Completely unfettered by the constraints of a normal life, they flit from place to place, always remaining curious, funny, engaging, and spirited. In “City of Death” (1979), they visit Paris, and exhibit what one could easily take to be the ultimate British response to the city:DOCTOR: It’s the only place in the universe where one can relax entirely.

  ROMANA: That bouquet!

  DOCTOR: What Paris has, it has an ethos, a life, it has—

  ROMANA: A bouquet?

  Their witty banter masks the fact that they show a surprising level of cultural sensitivity and curiosity. They aren’t there only to take a quick glance at Paris and be gone, but to look for a long time, and perhaps solve a mystery as well. Nor do they behave as one might fear that the stereotypically British traveler might, complaining
about the traffic or the rude Parisians or the language. Rather, they revel in the city itself and marvel at its beauty.

  The Doctor, Defender of British Dreams

  Doctor Who ran continuously for twenty-six years, from 1963 to 1989. It’s difficult to stress how influential it was on British culture. Television in and of itself has long been recognized as being a highly effective form of media, efficacy only increased by the length of time that a given show is on air. From a negative perspective, this can lead to violent or immoral shows having an adverse affect on a society. In the case of Doctor Who, though, it led to a re-imagining of the British people, in the Doctor’s image. The Doctor became the hero of every man, and Romana that of every woman—at least this was the ideal. One must always remember that, to some extent, the Doctor was a character created consciously to bring up the nation. “Every discussion of motion pictures as a propaganda device must include consideration of television because this medium, incorporating cinematography as it does, is the most efficient delivery system for bringing films to the masses of the world’s populations.”192

  Though there has been no official social-science study on the subject, there’s a clear and established link between portrayals of violence in the media and violence in the culture that consumes that media. Couldn’t there also be a link between portrayals of hope and perseverance and those qualities being evinced by the British culture at large? Science fiction, long considered to be a merely an escapist fantasy, has now become recognized as a true form of social commentary, allowing Doctor Who to be recognized as a popular work of social criticism. More than that, though, it’s popular. The show and its emblems, from Tom Baker’s scarf to the not very terrifying Daleks, have become ubiquitous emblems of the British people, recognized around the globe. The popular British sketch comedy show, Mock the Week, contained a section during one program entitled “Unlikely Lines to Hear in an Episode of Dr. Who” [sic], (2008). The Doctor, in the form of his fourth incarnation, has even graced American televisions in satire, appearing in two episodes of The Simpsons, if only for a moment, in the episode “Sideshow Bob’s Last Gleaming” (1995) and “Treehouse of Horror X” (1999).