October | 2013 | Sports 4 Starters

Less than a month from now, Doctor Who will celebrate a half-century of life; an astounding milestone for any television series, and a mere blink of an eye for a semi-immortal alien demigod-slash-mad-man-with-a-box. In those fifty years, the series has gone from an intended short-lived, lighthearted throwaway special on the BBC to a beloved stitch in the very fabric of British culture to a massive international pop icon with widespread demographic appeal, at the core of which is a feverishly obsessed and devout fanbase.

For all its frivolity and the make-it-up-as-you-go-along internal rulebook to which its writers have submitted themselves, and despite the fact that Doctor Who is and always has been, at heart, a kid’s show, the fact remains that it’s impossible to tell a story like the Doctor’s story without stumbling upon some profound insights concerning the nature of the universe and the human condition. Or at least, it’s impossible to tell a story like the Doctor’s successfully without addressing those ideas, and in all its ups and downs (and a roughly 15 year hiatus from television), one would be hard-pressed to make an argument that Doctor Who has been anything other than a rousing success. It is among the cornerstones of contemporary science-fiction (Star Trek writers, among others, have happily admitted to blatantly ripping it off) and one of the most endless creative and ambitious things on television today.

So to commemorate this historic moment, here’s a look at Doctor Who’s five most lasting insights into life, the universe, and everything.

5) The Universe is really, really, really big (and sort of crazy), and probably not a universe

From the get-go, the Doctor has had one advantage that no other science fiction character has ever had: he has a time machine, which is also a space ship, which is also really small (on the outside) and so parking isn’t an issue, and, oh yeah, being an immortal alien, scheduling is not really an issue for him. Translation to television writers: you have the freedom to put him literally anywhere, literally whenever; the downside is that you now have the responsibility to answer the question of what that looks like.

Think about it: if you really could go anywhere and any place in time, and that you were almost entirely devoid of restrictions, where would you really go? And how often? Because it’s not like you can just go once? You can go however often you’d like. Would that power make you lose your mind?

Well, Doctor Who says, yeah, it probably would. Insanity is the sad fate of the Doctor’s nemesis and counterpoint, the Master, who is driven insane because he knows how absolutely bonkers the universe is.

But as the story of the Doctor progressed, he appeared to develop a coping mechanism of sorts.

First, he kind of embraced his own insanity (part of the fun of the series is never quite knowing when he’s full of shit, or when he’s serious, or when he’s just kind of out his mind, or when he’s all three; see, for example, Jon Pertwee’s claims of knowing Venutian martial arts and then, y’know, actually kicking and karate-chopping people, or Paul McGann’s Doctor’s claim of being half-human on his mother’s side, which, just…no.)

Second, he embraced the insanity of the universe itself, which means the Doctor tends to favor travelling to two places – contemporary Earth, most often the Britain part of Earth, and wherever in the universe the most batshit effed-up nonsense is going down. Cactus people (which is a surprisingly common thing in the Doctor Whoniverse)! Devil monsters! Living plastic! The Doctor deals with his own madness by finding all the maddest mad things the mad universe has to offer, which says something about where he hangs out the most.

doctor-who-una-foto-promozionale-dei-vinvocci-per-il-doppio-speciale-the-end-of-time-142911

Sure. This is just a thing that happens.

Yep. It’s us. We’re the least-likely and most bizarre thing in a universe filled with unlikely and bizarre things. And the long, long list of Doctor Who writers have been able to embrace the inherent madness of the series thanks to the fact that, the more we understand things like quantum mechanics, string theory, and the multiverse, the more we come to the inevitable and mind-blowing conclusion that…

4) …Everything is something somewhere! (If it’s conceivable, it’s only conceivable because it actually happens somewhere in time in some reality in some dimension at some point.)

Doctor Who is filled with blatantly self-aware and self-referential moments. From the very first episode, “An Unearthly Child”, the show has maintained a running gag that nobody is able to enter the TARDIS without commenting on its most obvious feature (which, as Clara Oswald put it, is that it’s “smaller on the outside”, though most people seem to prefer focusing on its inner qualities). The first iteration of the Doctor explains that, well, yeah, it is, just like the television set you are currently using to watch “Doctor Who”. Y’know, because, while your television is restricted to its itty-bitty (or relatively itty-bitty, for all you 58 inch LED people) proportions, it can still fit entire people!! and, like, SPACE!!!, and India!!, and any and all varieties of really, really big things inside its limited and relative tininess! Zeitgeist synergy ahoy!!!

Some 25 years later, the Doctor’s companion Ace would walk out of a room in which a black and white television was tuned to the BBC in November of 1963 at the exact moment the first episode of Doctor Who would have aired!

The contemporary edition of Doctor Who, especially under Stephen Moffat’s supervision, has taken all those crazy implications of the very premise of the series and run with them, unafraid of confronting some of the uncomfortable and potentially suspensed-disbelief-snapping results. More than once the Doctor has hacked his way out of an impossible situation by utterly ignoring the rule of the prime mover (which is to say, either the chicken or the egg in the chicken-or-egg paradox) and assuming that, as the Doctor is a Time Lord, the restrictions of time (and thus cause and effect) should not apply (those, presumably, only apply to Time Serfs, like us). That’s all memorably spelled out in the Doctor’s hilariously botched attempt at explaining the mechanics of time (as a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff) in “Blink”.

But the resolutions of “Blink” and, on a much more grand scale, “The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang” absolutely rely on a no-cause self-dependent arrangement of time. The suggestion is that when you really think about it, the entirety of Doctor Who also relies on the same principles, it’s just rarely so bluntly addressed.

The most profound observations the Doctor makes, however, tend to be the ones in passing, and tend involve the most ludicrous of scenarios, when, in the second Matt Smith Christmas special, “The Doctor, the Widow, and the Wardrobe”, the Doctor finds himself on some weird Christmas Narnia Hell planet, which includes Christmas ornaments growing from trees. Obviously, the Doctor’s human companions remark at the wonder and silliness of such a thing, but the Doctor reminds us all that it’s a big universe, and everything is a thing somewhere, including organic Christmas tree ornaments.

It would be eye-rollingly absurd if there weren’t some good (if theoretical) science to back it up (as would the idea of anything existing without cause, which also has good science to back it up). There are essentially (and this is a vast oversimplification, but not a misleading one) two ways of looking at both a) the existence of humanity and b) the existence of the universe. Humanity (or even just complicated life) is either a sort of predictable by-product of the universe OR it is a completely and outrageously unlikely mistake, and the universe is either finite and singular (which is to say it had a caused beginning and will have an end) OR merely one iteration of an infinite and multiple massive reality (of which our universe was merely a tiny event in a causeless, endless multiverse). For the most part, science (at least since Einstein, who was still relatively cutting edge and fresh in peoples’ minds in 1963) has pulled us more and more to the latter conclusion in each of those cases.

But the most bizarre thing about our existence is the very fact that we can say with remarkable degree of confidence that we exist! We also know that we do some insanely weird shit (you won’t find Priuses or dog parks or sitcoms or pirate-themed-karaoke bars elsewhere in the universe, or at least not before you look for a very, very long time) that seems, well, out of place to say the least.

So, not to get too far ahead here, but the basic math suggests that, if we exist, and we do, and if the universe is infinite and one among infinite other universes, which it probably is, and if what happens in the universe is random, which it appears to be, then the only reason we existence and can invent fish fingers and custard is because the universe has enough time and space to make us inevitable. In other words, we are the result of an insanely inefficient system that ultimately can and does and will produce all possible things. Including, quite probably, many many more versions of ourselves living parallel lives.

Take one part infinite multiverse, one part infinite time, et voila! Processed breaded shreds of aquatic lifeforms and egg-yoke-based creamy substances! For eating! Makes perfect sense.

The implications are mind-blowing, disturbing, humbling, upsetting, inspiring, reassuring, and basically impossible to swallow and contextualize, but there is ample reason to suggest that they are the right implications nonetheless. We’ll probably never go to Christmas-tree-ornament world, but reality is probably such a big jumbled chaotic and limitless mess that in some version of some universe at some point it does, or will, ultimately exist. And there’s the Doctor, pointing it out all nonchalant and blissfully dismissive of the profundity of it all.

3) Personality is enormously influenced by appearance

In the late 1960s, the creative team behind Doctor Who found itself in a really, really rough and unexpected situation: the series was outrageously popular, which it was never intended to be, so walking away was becoming less of an option, and the actor playing the title character was becoming too ill to carry on. So they did something insane – they killed off the main character, and then re-cast him, and then brought him back to life. One of the core components of the mythology of Doctor Who was totally pulled out of the writers’ asses in order to save a show that otherwise would have to have been killed out of necessity. Thus was born the concept of regeneration.

When Patrick Troughton took over from William Hartnell, the original idea was that this “regenerated” Doctor was actually just what he seemed: a younger version of the existing Doctor (as if to suggest that William Hartnell himself would have looked like Patrick Troughton in photographs taken twenty years or so earlier, which he didn’t, but that’s neither here nor there).

Uncanny! I mean, they’re both, like, white, right? Basically the same.

The idea was categorically not that this was an altogether new physical form – the Doctor had merely Benjamin Buttoned. But because Patrick Troughton was a very, very different sort of actor (with a very different distinct physicality) than Hartnell, it turned out that just sort of forcing him to play the exact same role didn’t make much sense. More to the point, the Doctor himself was such a larger-than-life and enigmatic sort of character that not much of who he actually was had even been established. Why would it have been? There had been no intention of letting anyone take over the role, and he was a time-traveling, mysterious alien grandfather hero guy. What more did you need to know beyond what Hartnell so effortlessly brought? The challenge of recasting a character to play a role that had never been defined beyond the original casting of the original actor yielded some unintended consequences, all of them good.

First, the BBC had an ingenious and totally serendipitous mechanism for keeping the series going indefinitely and giving it a totally fresh start whenever it started getting stale. Second, by gradually ditching the Troughton-as-young-Hartnell angle and eventually writing in the new rule that this was just something the Doctor (and any other Timelord) could just do when necessary, the series added a fascinating dimension that challenged our stubborn and stringent idea of what makes an individual an individual.

In fairness, this is not an area of exploration unique to Doctor Who. The body-swap concept has been done and done, from Kafka to Freaky Friday and its various remake/knockoffs, to Big and 13 Going on 30 and whatever the thing where Zac Efron played Matthew Perry was called, to the superb Buffy episode in which Buffy and Faith switch bodies and learn to empathize with each other, and, yes, take on aspects of the personality of the other (also the plot of Face/Off). But there’s a difference between merely swapping two existing characters and transplanting them into corresponding bodies, or magically throwing a 13-year-old into the body of a 30-year-old and seeing how that changes her behavior, and what Doctor Who does. This is not the Doctor waking up and finding himself to be a giant cockroach. This is the Doctor waking up and finding himself to be himself but with a different appearance. That’s it. He looks different. And this always changes who he is in some remarkable and obvious ways.

Following Troughton, each actor brought his own style and sensibility to the Doctor. He was at turns a dashing young do-gooder (Davison), a maniacal and devious man-child (T. Baker), a snarky, arrogant rogue (Eccleston), and a clownish, short-tempered, brilliant fop (McCoy). But he was always the same person “in there”. He was the Doctor. But what does that even mean?

We tend to narrowly define identity, or self-hood, as that vessel that shares, develops, and assimilates memories, and we don’t really have much better than that to even go on. There are two things to keep in mind: every cell in your body is in a constant state of flux (turns out, you are a way better and more efficient regenerator than Timelords are!) and every subatomic particle of every atom of every cell of your body was born at the moment the universe came into existence. The big bang is arguably more authentically, identifiably, and unchangingly “you” than you are. So the very ideas of self-hood and existence are fluid at best.

Yet all of us seem to have at least a solid instinctive belief that we are someone and that when we look at our bodies in the mirror or in photographs we can identify that image of that body as, in some way, ourselves. We don’t say we are our bodies, but we don’t think they fully aren’t us. Luckily, it’s something we don’t really have to confront, but we might be able to identify some core values or personality traits about ourselves if we were forced to occasionally ditch our physical identities and walk around looking like an entirely different person, and it wouldn’t be in the least bit surprising if, say, you woke up tomorrow looking like Brad Pitt or Jennifer Lawrence and you started acting very differently than you did yesterday.

There is a Doctor that all the various forms of Doctor share. He is curious, conflicted, brilliant, sharp, sad; he has regrets that inform his decisions and he carries a burden he never quite comes clean about. He is flawed but unendingly and unceasingly compassionate. He is, or aspires to be, the embodiment of goodness, which means he sometimes goes too far and totally ruins everything. All the different bodies of the Doctor blend their own traits and quirks with those essential Doctor qualities. So it may in fact be that at the core of who the Doctor is, regardless of the circumstances, is the very thing that he perceives humanity to be. And the revelation there is that he might be right.

The Doctor holds, as it were, the mirror up to humanity.

2) Life is (??????????), and so death is (??????????). But either way, it’s a big deal.

Baffling and counter-intuitive as it may seem, “life” is a very difficult thing to pin down. You might think accomplished, confident people in white lab coats could give you the official, unambiguous definition, but that, alas, does not quite pan out in practice.

Run an experiment. Just go ask someone who you think is a) relatively well-educated and b) probably knows what “life” means and ask them to define “life” to you. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

How’d that go? Did you hear something about breathing? Consuming and processing energy? Autonomy? Being carbon-based? What about consciousness? What about organic matter? What about the ability to die? Do those things matter? Did the person you ask say, “uh, well, y’know it’s…like, there’s, if something’s alive, then it has…so, there’s…I have to go!”?

Turns out that we have a pretty good intuitive sense about what life is and we can even agree on some specific qualifications that allow things to pass the “life” test, but when it comes to the questions on the margins, we mostly just leave those to interpretation. Knowing that we are alive tends to be good enough for us. But the questions at the margins still do matter (just look at the ceaseless, furious arguments over abortion and “when life begins” or whether people in permanent vegetative states are legitimately alive). These questions will ultimately become far more significant as we inch closer and closer towards creating legitimately sentient, autonomous artificial intelligence (so if we build a three-story processor that requires a permanent power source and cannot move or express itself but is aware it exists, is it alive?)

Doctor Who, sometimes inadvertently and sometimes not, forces us to toss out the unanswerable question of “what does it mean to be alive?” and redirect our focus on what we really care about (and rightly so): the question of mortality.

The Doctor is clearly not interested in developing a framework by which we determine what qualifies as life. How else to explain his feelings of guilt and acts of mercy toward the Daleks, his (and everyone’s…) arch nemeses who want to do nothing but kill him (and are terrible at that) and destroy and conquer everything in the universe?

The Daleks are machines of death, without free will and with conscience, and the only shred of identifiable organic matter they possess is buried deep in a thick metal prison. But they can die, and they can go extinct, and to the Doctor, that’s all that matters. That alone grants them a measure of dignity.

Mortality matters more than life does. Mortality is the only thing that gives our lives meaning and moral dimension. Without mortality we would have no ambition, no value of the lives of other or ourselves, no sense of time or significance. We would be unrecognizable as a species, if in fact we would be anything at all. Evolution requires mortality.

But that’s not to say we have a decent understanding of what death is, either. And for the Doctor, death is a fundamentally different concept than it is for us. Probably best explored in the “Human Nature” two-part story, the Doctor, in temporarily becoming a mortal human, learns that his immortality comes at cost: he will never grow old with someone, he will never be able to rest, and he is damned to watch every mortal being he loves die and eventually fade from memory. His immortality (or rather his quasi-mortality) demands that he adjust to and learn to live with the fact that his experience of existence is different from that of almost anyone else in the universe. It is, in a sense, a curse and a burden.

It should also make us rethink our own understanding of mortality, because the Doctor does die (or at least, he says, “it feels like dying”), because, in regenerating, most of what he’d come to identify as himself fades and a new person gets up and walks away with his memories and his identity. And the Doctor Who universe is loaded with cases of ambiguous “deaths” and the tenuous relationships that we have to our lifespans once a sense of linear time is taken out of the picture.

In essence, what Doctor Who suggests to us, over and over, is that our mortality is a precious gift given the static relationship to cause-and-effect-based time within which we are forced to exist. But Einsteinian physics tells us that, as we move further and faster out into space, the idea of time breaks down until it becomes meaningless, and if time is malleable and subject to perception and circumstance, then so too should our idea of mortality. Death is sad because all death involves loss, and loss is sad, and we should take life seriously in order to minimize suffering, but not at the expense of overlooking the fact that our mortality is circumstantial and, in the grand scheme of the endless, infinite, and unbound universe, probably not quite as well-defined and final as we think it is. Rest easy; we are all part of a totally incomprehensible, bizarre creation, and that we don’t fully understand even our most basic relationship to that creation should give us all a great sense of hope.

1) Friends matter

It’s fitting that the most significant running theme of Doctor Who is also the most humanistic one – that nothing matters more than developing relationships with people who need you, or are in need, or merely share a spirit of adventure and discovery (or are Adric).

The Doctor’s relationships have been happily ambiguous and unorthodox from the very beginning, when he was traveling with Susan, ostensibly his granddaughter, and the TARDIS, with which he has a meaningful and deeply personal relationship. The actual relationship between the Doctor and Susan may very well be that of a grandfather-granddaughter one, but little-to-nothing is ever revealed about the Doctor’s family history or how he came to be a single grandfather patrolling the universe with the offspring of his apparent children (though many potentially heart-breaking hints are dropped throughout the series). And his relationship with the TARDIS is even more unorthodox and deliberately so.

When the Doctor decides to take Ian and Barbara on board the TARDIS as his first “companions”, part of the appeal, whether they are consciously aware of it or not, is that the Doctor is a stranger with strange companions, and there is something instantly disarming and alluring about that. No one is an outsider to the Doctor. We are all worthy, we are all strange, and we are all fit companions.

As the series progressed, one of the unwritten “rules” appeared to be that the Doctor’s relationships are never romantic. First of all, this is sort of misreading correlation for causality. Because it might be true that while writers never spelled out the Doctor’s romantic relationships (the Twilight set had yet to be invented and thus were not being courted), they were there. It’s hard to look at his relationships with Romana or Sarah Jane Smith as totally unromantic, even if they weren’t necessarily relationships of (outwardly) physical romance.

Later Doctors certainly had romantic feelings for various companions (notably Paul McGann’s Doctor and Grace, and David Tennant’s Doctor and Rose), but the true unwritten “rule” turned out to be that the while the Doctor does occasionally have romantic feelings for companions, these relationships never define the Doctor, the series, or his relationships to anyone else.

That’s important because Doctor Who makes a much bigger, broader statement about what defined human intimacy. Loyalty, acceptance, camaraderie, and compassion come first, and any relationship can be a legitimate and meaningful one as long as those are there. Tin dogs, omnisexual immortal rogues, teenage Earthlings, Scottish highlanders, fellow Timelords, his own future in-laws, Adric – it doesn’t matter. The Doctor picks companions he needs, and who he needs often depends on who and where he is.

And the idea of the Doctor’s quirky relationships extending to the TARDIS is wonderfully explored in Neil Gaiman’s episode “The Doctor’s Wife”, but it wasn’t a new revelation. His love for the TARDIS as a person and as a friend has been a defining aspect of the series all along, and Gaiman merely brought the idea to the surface.

There’s something wonderful and richly touching about the Doctor’s best friend and greatest love being a machine. Like everything else in Doctor Who, it challenges our preconceived notions about basic ideas like personhood, identity, and love. But more importantly it presents the case that no one can or should be alone. There’s someone out there for everyone. Hell, there’s millions out there for everyone. You just have to know where to look, and to remember that things change, and that you change, and that sometimes you have to let people go, bring new people on board, and not look at the impermanence of it all as a curse but as a gift.

You are an ever-changing vessel in an ever-changing, endless universe. There is no off button. Better take someone along for the ride.

And then, of course, there’s the first question: