Doctor Who quotes

Lily: "What's happening?"
Doctor: "No idea. Do what I do. Hold on and pretend it's a plan."

Doctor Who: The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe

Gilmore Girls quotes

ZACH: "Yeah, well, live and learn. Like, now I know not to drink the water in Mexico, which, by the way, somebody should really tell you. And I learned that I'm not morally against murder. I just wish I had the guts to do it."

Gilmore Girls 7.02:  That's What You Get, Folks, For Makin' Whoopee

Doctor Who quotes

DOCTOR: "Just one small question ... why do you want to blow up the world?"


Doctor Who 4.03 The Underwater Menace

The Evolution of the Doctor - from zero to hero

The Doctor

I've been having something of a binge on Classic Doctor Who lately. There's plenty there to choose from, of course, so this could keep me going for quite some time. I've mostly been sticking to the Doctors I remember best from my childhood, picking out odd stories here and there pretty much as the whim strikes me, but I've also gone back to the very beginning and watched a few of the very earliest First Doctor stories, which I had never seen before, to get more of a feel for where the character comes from. The latest season of NuWho made such a big deal about what the Doctor has become and the mystery of who he is, I felt the need to get back to basics and re-discover who he was back then and how he started out.

Classic Who can be a bit hard to watch at first for someone more accustomed to modern television standards. It's very different from the re-booted show as we know it today, so there's a lot to adjust to, and it can take a good few stories to tune your brain into the slower rhythm of the classic show and its serialized narrative structure. This is especially true of the First Doctor's stories, made way back in 1963 when television was still heavily grounded in theatre. There's not much subtle about it; it's a bit like watching a stage play that's been filmed – which, in many ways, is pretty much exactly what it is. A lot of allowances have to be made, but I find that the trick is to hook into the characters and the story, because if you can do that, all those other issues just fall away. And it's worth making the effort to get to know the Doctor that bit better, to learn who he was before the re-boot reinvented him for modern times – to experience some of the friendships and adventures that helped shape him into the man he is today.

Susan and the Doctor

So, the First Doctor – it's an incredible journey that takes him from here to Eleven! When we first meet him, he is basically a recluse. Once a pioneer among his own people, he says, he is now an outcast, and we have never learned quite why, but he has reacted by withdrawing deep into his shell. Travelling the universe with his granddaughter Susan in what we have since learned is a stolen Tardis, his only interest in the planets they visit is scientific. He is not interested in people or their problems at all. He is certainly not the hero of the show, merely its catalyst…in many ways, even, something of an antagonist. As the show opens, he and Susan have been living in London 1963 for five months, but the only reason they have stayed that long is because Susan likes it there. To the Doctor, it is just another place, populated by primitives, for him to study objectively but not get attached to.

The Doctor, Barbara and Ian

But then along come Ian and Barbara, teachers from the school Susan has enrolled at – because, unlike her grandfather, she craves company and society. They are concerned and curious enough about their strange student to try to visit her at her home address, and then, thanks to circumstance, suspicion, misunderstanding and clashing personalities, find themselves inside the Tardis…whereupon the Doctor panics and takes off with them aboard, so that they can't tell anyone what they have seen. His attitude toward them is high-handed in the extreme, to say nothing of hostile. To him, a technologically advanced alien, these humans from 1963 are little more than ignorant savages and he treats them as such: with utter contempt and disdain.

This is the starting point of the show. This is where the Doctor begins his journey. It isn't a promising start. It's just as well, then, that he doesn't also end there.

What happens to the First Doctor over the course of the next few stories is basically this: Ian and Barbara.

Barbara, Ian, the Doctor and Susan

Circumstance has thrown them together and circumstance also throws them headlong into a series of gruelling adventures that force them to cooperate with one another, like it or not, in order to survive. And through it all, quite without intending to, the Doctor gets to know his reluctant new companions – gets to know them as people, rather than the ignorant primitives he had originally dismissed them as. He sees them confronted by actual cave people, who truly are ignorant savages, and watches the way they treat those people with kindness and compassion, rather than the disdain he had heaped upon them for being similarly primitive in comparison to himself. He sees the courage and determination they display as they are plunged from one ordeal to another, always trying to do the right thing by those they meet and standing up for the oppressed wherever they find them, battling culture shock all the while. He sees their willingness to forgive the way he has treated them and to cooperate with him despite his appalling behaviour. He sees their loyalty and ingenuity and adaptability.

And he realizes that he was wrong. They might be intellectually primitive, compared with him, but what the Doctor learns through the course of his adventures with Ian and Barbara is that they don't need to be his intellectual equals in order to have value, because they are remarkable individuals in their own right, who are more than worthy of his trust and friendship, even admiration and respect.

Barbara, Ian and the Doctor

This, right here, is the very beginning of the Doctor's enduring love affair with the human race, which still going strong now – almost 50 years later for us, perhaps many hundreds of years later for him. He has been actively seeking out human companionship ever since, delighting in how wonderful they can be – and lamenting when they fail to live up to the standard set for them. It is also the start of the Doctor's journey toward becoming the hero of his own story, as he begins his transition from isolationist to interventionist. And it unfolds on-screen, right before our eyes. The television might be primitive, compared with our modern standards – in much the same way that Ian and Barbara seemed primitive to the Doctor, until he got to know them properly and learned to appreciate them for who they are, instead of dismissing them for what they are not – but as a piece of character history and development it is absolutely fantastic.

…plus, those early adventures also see the birth of the Doctor's equally enduring enmity with the Daleks, but that's another story…