Who Will Be The New Doctor
by Phoolproof

In the question of “Who should be the next Doctor?”, the next question is “What do the writers and producers of the show think of humanity?” Or even more specifically, “What do the writers and producers of the show think their audience thinks of humanity?” What are the qualities and characteristics that the audience of Doctor Who wants to send out into the void, (quite literally), like those golden records placed aboard the Voyager probes?

It’s an important question. Many people take great solace from the Doctor’s adventures, because he represents them as they would like to be, or as they would like someone out there to be. In “The Girl in the Fireplace”, Stephen Moffat has Madame de Pompadour say “One may tolerate a world of demons for the sake of an angel.” The audience can accept that they will never be the Doctor as long as his character, his authority, is recognizable, familiar, not too alien. That’s why there has been a general humanizing of the character since the show’s beginnings, why the FOX pilot in the 1990s went so far as to make the Doctor himself half-human. The new series has settled for having the Doctor possess alien biology and knowledge, while his motivations, morals, and especially his speech, are all deeply human. So whoever gets to pilot the Tardis has to be humanity’s best foot forward. Their smiling face turned towards the cosmos.

The show’s production team has a tricky job, since the character they are casting has to embody so much. It’s not like casting a police show in the USA, where all you have to do is make one of the detectives a white dude who looks unkempt but handsome, the other detective a busty woman with a no-nonsense look on her face, and give them a boss who’s black/Latino/Asian with a square jaw and an I’ve-seen-it-all demeanor. Casting the Doctor is you saying “This is what I think people should be like.” It might help their decision if we look back at the previous incarnations, their hits and their misses.

I’ll skip blithely over the first two Doctors. They were old craggy-cheeked men who looked good in B/W television. The character of the Doctor didn’t mean what it does now, they were daft grumpy mad scientists who made the monsters go away, they didn’t embody any integrated ideas about humanity’s place in the universe.

The Third Doctor was when the show starts to get good, by general agreement. Part of that is that it hit the ground running with a really good first episode, “Spearhead from Space”. This episode broke the usual rules in some important ways. At first, the Doctor himself is on the run. Not from Daleks, from us, humans, on contemporary Earth. (I won’t address the UNIT dating controversy here.) The alien invasion he eventually thwarts is genuinely scary. It’s the Autons, for the first time. They aren’t robots or random blobs, they are simulated humans. They don’t slowly lumber across the landscape, they RUN at you. They are shown KILLING random extras, real civilian cross-fire. There is a sense of real loss and consequences that is generally absent from the first two Doctors’ stories. It’s also here that the Doctor really takes on the avuncular attitude towards humanity which characterizes him for a long time, the “You’re young and brash and you don’t understand a lot yet, but I’ll help get you through these early days in the Universe if you’ll just be patient and listen and not ask too many questions.” How did this much improved vision of the Doctor and his authority over the events in the stories come to be?

The answer is World War Two.

The production team that put together this new vision were veterans, if not of the war, than at least of military service. Barry Letts served on a submarine during the war, Robert Holmes fought in Burma, Terrance Dicks and Douglas Camfield did national service. They shared a common sense that conflict has consequences, that things get dirty and out of control fast, that hidebound HQ types never listen to you. Time and again, the Doctor is ignored or sabotaged by “higher” authorities, like that guy Chinn who’s auditing UNIT during “Claws of Axos”. They shared, too, a sense that evil is as diverse in its malice as good is in its virtues, and out of that sense came the Master, the Doctor’s greatest antagonist. Yeah yeah Daleks, Davros, fine, but they’re always reductive where the Master is creative, inventive. He’s as ardent for evil as the Doctor for good.

The vision this team created, of the Doctor struggling against incompetent/inconsistent allies, insufficient information, bad luck, his only constant ally a courageous young woman, this is an infantryman’s Doctor. He’s been stranded on Earth by his superiors, not allowed to come home, and his key piece of equipment is malfunctioning. Sound like the infantry to anybody else?

This Doctor leads from ahead, not behind. He pushes into worse and worse danger, in order to discover vital truths. And most importantly for this vision of the Doctor, sometimes BAD things happen, and they have visible and irreversible consequences. No free rides on the time-wipe-everything-back-the-way-it-was merry-go-round. In “Day of the Daleks”, the Dalek plan to sabotage the future peace conference is only defeated in the end through Shura’s use of a suicide bomb. The Third Doctor is unable to elude the truth that some die so that others might live.

The Fourth Doctor inherited this vision and extended it. Where the Third Doctor struggled to correct and challenge the abuses of large groups, the Fourth Doctor is more comfortable playing a lone hand in the dark. The Fourth Doctor’s adventures took place in hidden corners of the universe, underneath Victorian London, on forgotten derelict spaceships. His self-reliance and confidence and anti-authority attitude emerged through conflict with covert villains, whose lairs he usually entered as a prisoner, the quicker to discover their secrets. This vision of the Doctor as a scientist carrying light into dark places was displayed openly in “The Brain of Morbius”, when the Doctor saves himself and the occult Sisterhood of Karn from crisis by showing how their “sacred flame”, the hidden center of their cult which has been extinguished, has a scientific origin and can be re-lit from the soot that lines its chimney. The Fourth Doctor embodied Carl Sagan’s description of science as “a candle in the dark.” Even as his later stories got campy, with a focus on the unpredictable and alien elements of his character, this basic vision held good.

The Fifth Doctor was a significant step towards humanizing the Doctor even further. He was younger in appearance than any Doctor so far, his facial and emotional reactions were the most human. During most of his tenure, he had more than one companion, and he tended to behave towards them like a teacher on the ultimate field trip. He was always very concerned that they not wander off and get into trouble. He held the authority established by the previous Doctors, and he struggled with many of the same antagonists, but he was much less willing (able?) to conceal his emotions. You could see his hunger for justice and peace, his empathy with all concerned. Even when Omega’s return to our universe in “Arc of Infinity” threatens to destroy everything, the Doctor cannot pick up a gun to destroy him without regret. His expression in that moment is full of responsibility and pain, it’s a good parallel to the Tenth Doctor’s similar scene in “The End of Time”, confronting the return of Rassilon.

This was a good take on the character after the Fourth Doctor, whose bohemian self-regard often made him exasperating and cryptic. He did not often reveal his feelings, notably in his final scene with Sarah Jane Smith, where he is unable to open his heart to her or acknowledge her sense of the moment. The Fifth Doctor did not guard himself like this. He had the passions and fearlessness to match his youthful style.

The Sixth and Seventh Doctors were two different attempts to extend and variegate that vision of the Doctor’s authority, established by the preceding three. Neither was wholly successful. The Sixth Doctor placed the Doctor’s superior knowledge and mastery directly in the foreground of the show. He’s always arguing, insulting and belittling people, especially Peri, his companion, whose tone of voice reminds me now of my six-year-old daughter explaining why she needs another chocolate bar. It could have worked, the Third Doctor could certainly be masterful and dismissive. But it got mean, too mean. There was a sullenness about the events the audience witnessed, a sense that the universe wasn’t living up to the Doctor’s standards. The first half of “Revelation of the Daleks”, for example, is nonstop complaints, from every character on screen. Adventures can be slow or fast, thrilling or creeping, but not sullen.

The Seventh Doctor was a more successful attempt. These shows focused on the cryptic, hypnotic and generally uncanny elements of the Doctor’s authority. It helped that this was mostly done through comic turns and moments. I’m particularly fond of when Sabalom Glitz tells the Doctor to distract a guard in “Dragonfire” and his response is to ask the guard, “Tell me, do you have any thoughts on the nature of existence? Any strong religious or philosophical beliefs?” The Seventh Doctor took the Doctor’s general disinclination to answer questions about as far as it could go, responding with puns and wordplay to any serious attempt. His popular companion, Ace, was a teenager from our time whose maturation was a subtext of the episodes, and pairing her teenage naivete and general indifference to specific details with his mature blather worked fine.

That said, the Seventh Doctor was a fairly small development of the Doctor’s character. The production took previous established elements of his authority, his wit, his games-playing, his traps and bluffs, and set them in new faster-paced scenarios. It was worth doing, but it’s no surprise that the new show’s vision of the Doctor’s authority looked back to the Third, Fourth and Fifth Doctors to please their audience.

Russell T Davies has been very open about his fondness for the scripts written by Robert Holmes, who wrote “Spearhead from Space”, “The Ark in Space”, “Carnival of Monsters”, and “The Caves of Androzani”, among other fan favorites. Davies clearly took from Holmes and his co-producers those elements of the Doctor’s authority that were vital, like his curiosity, his general intellectual mastery, his deep impatience with boredom, his need to influence events and make a difference. Davies’ genius in re-launching the show was to place the Doctor as the last Time Lord, the only survivor of a massive war, so that all these characteristics became exaggerated by trauma. Where the Third Doctor disliked being bored, the Ninth found it intolerable. Where the Fourth Doctor was curious about everything, the Ninth could hardly sit still in a room. Where the Fifth Doctor was moved to protect decency from malice, the Ninth had such a profound sense of the cost and cruelty of evil, since he had seen just how bad things can get, that each contact with it was taken very, very personally.

The Ninth Doctor is a very open Doctor, his emotions are as close to the surface as the Fifth’s, but where the Fifth Doctor led his emotions with his reason, the Ninth lets his reason serve his emotions. He lets Cassandra die in “The End of the World”, (he thinks) because he’s just lost a new friend and is not in control of his grief about her loss, as he is not in control of his grief about the Time War and the loss of Gallifrey. He has lost so much that he is not sure that life is worth living at all. “Everything has its time and everything dies”, he says, watching Cassandra stretch to the breaking point. He embraces pure action as a way to avoid the reflection needed to incorporate his grief. It’s no coincidence that his very first word in the series is “Run!”. The character subtext of his whole series is recovery, recovery from immense loss, recovery of the distinction between mere loss and meaningful sacrifice. He and Rose Tyler developed a neat reciprocal exchange, where, as she says, “The Doctor showed me a better way to live your life” and in return, she shows him, as in “Dalek”, that his deepest need currently is to examine himself, to recover his joy in existence.

The Tenth Doctor took that ball and ran with it. If there’s one Doctor who represents a pure delight in existence, it’s the Tenth. As he says to the Master near the end of his tenure, “You don’t have to rule the universe, just see it.” The joy he feels is nicely balanced between himself, other sentient beings, inanimate objects, and Being in the abstract, he’s able to see joy everywhere. He’s a very psychically resilient and flexible character. The only problem for him at first is that he falls in love.

It fits completely that the Tenth Doctor would fall in love with Rose, out of gratitude to her for helping to restore his sense of belonging in the universe. It also was one of the main unexplored areas for the Doctor’s authority. Although Davies added some sex and general lustiness to the show under the Ninth, especially with Captain Jack Harkness, romantic love was never an element of the older Doctors, let alone with their companions. As part of the general project of humanizing the Doctor, of making him our face on the cosmos, romantic love has to come in somewhere. I don’t think we’re so jaded yet as to omit it entirely as part of what we want people to be.

The Tenth Doctor was a successful addition and summation of the Doctor’s authority to date. Wit, brilliance, courage, self-sacrifice, empathy, love, curiosity, the delight in Being, irreverence, he had everything his predecessors had and more. So where does one go from here, Stephen Moffat must have asked himself at the start of the Eleventh Doctor’s tenure, what do I do to make the Doctor grow?

His answer was to grow boyish. Not just in appearance, although the Eleventh Doctor is certainly boyish looking, but in general esprit de Tardis. Where the Tenth Doctor took joy in the universe, the Eleventh takes glee. He has all the qualities of his predecessors, but his general perspective on those qualities is a boy’s perspective. He has no taste for complicated abstractions, he likes puzzles and games even more than the Seventh, (he plays Live Chess, for sheesh). His attitude towards tragic matters is to ignore and gloss over them, as when asked about the Time War. “It was a bad day, bad stuff happened.” This is a boy talking.

That’s why when Moffat decided to continue to include romance and love in the Doctor’s adventures, it had to be romance and love from a boy’s point of view. And as boys see it, these days, the girls call the shots when it comes to love. Amy Pond calls the Doctor and Rory “her boys”, River Song calls him “sweetie.” River can fly the Tardis better, she gets to carry guns, she’s more assertive about everything, and she knows what’s going to happen. Amy forces the Doctor to focus on what she considers relevant, she’s the one who frames the problem of an episode for the Doctor to solve it. When Rory reminds her that the Doctor is a “Time Lord”, she retorts “It’s just what they’re called. It doesn’t mean he actually knows what he’s doing.” In this regard, the Doctor is just Rory writ alien, dependent on Amy and River to point him in the right direction and say “Go, fix.” The scenes where the Doctor and Rory are alone together, talking about Amy, are unusually poignant for scenes between two men in a science-fiction show, or any show, and it’s because they are talking to themselves.

As an aside, anyone who’s seen Coupling could have expected this when Stephen Moffat took over the show. Coupling is a general hymn to a world where women have all the authority that matters, and men fight a desperate rearguard action to preserve their boyish hobbies, like video games and pornography and fantasizing about celebrities. What else could such a man do with a show built around a strong male lead than invent a stronger female lead, better yet, TWO of them, and then write the strong male lead as much like a precocious child as possible?

Anyone who doubts that this is what Moffat did, and it didn’t fail or anything, it was fun and displayed Matt Smith’s talents for playfulness very well, should rewatch “The Doctor’s Wife”. In this episode, we find out that the Tardis is sentient, that it’s a woman, that it knows a helluva lot more about the future than the Doctor does, and that it’s the only thing that’s been keeping him alive all these years. Neil Gaiman has Amy say “A boy and his box, off to see the universe.” The Doctor replies, “It’s the best thing there is.”

Now what? The show added trauma and recovery under the Ninth, joy and romance under the Tenth, boyish and sentimental zaniness under the Eleventh. What do we need from the new production, where can we continue to extend the Doctor’s authority and that vision of the Doctor as the best humanity can offer?

My answer is not a new character trait, but a shift in perspective. What we need is for the Doctor to take the initiative. The Doctor needs to stop letting the bad guys play white, waiting for them to lay schemes and ploys, so that he can disrupt them at the eleventh hour and restore the status quo. In a word, the Doctor needs a goal. Not just for him/herself or a companion, but for reality. It doesn’t need to appear in every episode, the Doctor can still be a traveling medicine show, but he needs to move towards improving the universe, rather than just seeing and defending it. So my suggestion for the production team is, whoever you cast and whatever they look like, let the Doctor go on the offensive.

Lessons from WIATI

by Phoolproof

A key lesson from the Wars on Iraq, Afghanistan, and Terror Itself, (May we rip her dull claws straight from the collective amygdala, never to return to our realm!), is that it is even easier to control the public narrative in the age of the Internet then it was in the age of print (WWI), radio (WWII), or television (Vietnam). The clumsy techniques of print forgery and newspaper censorship and propaganda that were used by Wilson's Committee on Public Information have been entirely superseded by simple omission, the refusal to discuss unwanted elements, and by outsourcing the job of propagation, rumor and antagonism onto private parties online. These private parties have two goals. The first is to preserve the freedom of the virtual to criticize the real, endlessly and without regard for any limits. The second, and of far greater consequence, is to preserve the virtual from any serious responsibility for the real. To this end, they will assume all manner of trivial responsibilities (Kickstarter, Etsy, online petitions to get old TV shows re-broadcast, etc.) in the interest of avoiding physical action. A good example is the online fundraising drives to compensate the man in whose boat was found one of the alleged Boston Marathon bombers. The appearance of responsible behavior, without the weight. The virtual seeks levity.

Another lesson from WIATI is how the US public forum has thoroughly entangled issues of principle with issues of efficacy and expediency. Good examples of this abound, but the first that springs to mind is the use of targeted cruise missiles over gravity bombing. This has been portrayed in the media as both an example of principled warmaking, a conscious attempt to minimize civilian casualties, and as more effective warmaking, "only breaking as much as we need to break." The documentary Control Room, which focuses on the Al-Jazeera newsroom in the first quarter of 2003, features a Marine PR officer contrasting the US's bombing campaign to liberate Iraq with the far more destructive aerial bombing that took place in WWII. The same case was made to me by a veteran non-com back in 2006, and he expressed surprise that Americans continued to foot the much larger bill for targeted ordnance. (I think he said that a cruise missile was 40 times the equivalent untargeted ordnance in cost, although I’m sure that figure is misleading, since it doesn’t allow for the costs of the plane and the training and so forth. The economic analysis of destruction is a piece of our WWII heritage that seems likely to thrive.)

The question here isn't whether targeted ordnance is more principled, more effective, or both. Here it is simply a superior example of how contemporary discussions of WIATI have any side of any issue tacking back and forth between principle and efficacy, using either as the base for offense or defense whenever it seems attractive. The internal consistency of cause which Aquinas and Augustine insisted on as the basis of just war is no longer seen as a desired end. What is now desired is an optimum outcome, in any given circumstance. Not as simple as “the ends justify the means”, the guiding maxim is “Don’t admit to any ends until they occur. Maintain the means and ignore both start and finish.” This is why there has been no strong effort to place WIATI in a larger context of the country’s founding principles or its future desiderata. It would set boundaries on an unbounded war.

Another lesson from the WIATI is how completely the US may ignore the policymakers of Europe in defense policy, let alone the wishes of its people. Having underwritten the last 65 years of European economic growth by subsidizing its defense needs at the expense of our domestic development, a subsidy that continues to this day, we can rightly dismiss their anti-American contingent as the whingeing of dependency, and their pro-American contingent as suckups and kissasses. The first is exemplified by France and some of Italy, the second by Poland, Britain and the industrial areas of Germany. This unimportant spectrum of opinion lets Europe think it matters, and that is all to the good, since fictional outlets for impotence have been shown to work as well as real ones.

Another lesson from WIATI is that popular assemblies, whether in streets or halls, are less effective than ever before as an expression of civic will. Whether pro or anti or nuanced, all public assemblies from this era have served purely as fodder for televisual media, whose bias towards sensation in the short term have served not only to negate political effect, but to taint the entire idea of direct civic action with the idea that its participants are simply obsessives of one sort or another. The response from that section of the nation to whom this is their introduction to the nation's shared life has been overwhelmingly in favor of indifference, irony and the weary sigh of "Can't someone else do it?" The long term effects suggest that the next wars for the US will be ever more expensive, since citizens will have to be motivated purely by self-interest to engage in them, but much less cantankerous, since people will not have the energy to spare for contention, nor the will to sort competing truth claims for a conflict they expect to be over almost before it starts.

Another lesson from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is how effectively a nation can shift blame for its actions onto a single person. "Bush lied" should provide good cover for the consequences of the wars for generations. For those who pride themselves on a thoughtful and in-depth look at the issues surrounding the wars, you may add "Rumsfeld screwed up the execution." If you are teaching foreign policy at the undergrad level, feel free to go with "National economic interests intersected with the desire to overthrow a tyrant." If at the grad level, revert to "Bush lied."

Another lesson from WIATI is how self-importance and two-facedness have become the dominant attitudes of US professional organizations towards their government and especially their military. Groups like the AMA, the NYRB, academics and nonprofits and religious groups of every kind, have publicly and hollowly condemned varied aspects of WIATI since its inception, despite their opinion not being solicited nor their charter demanding such condemnations. The hollowness is the vital element to be noted in this trend. Even a few decades ago, no President could have brought about a war to which so much of the country's varied authorities were at least nominally opposed. WIATI has shown the essential freedom of action of the Pentagon, and the US President as its head, unbound by any foreign or domestic agency, as President Bush's handling of the funding for the Iraq war through Congress displayed. Anti-war opposition in the US now appears much as it has been in Europe for decades, as a social class marker of "sensitivity" and "historically conscious" and all the other glad stories. There does not appear to be any place left in the US where opposition to war, as a matter of principle, can command any social acceptance at all.

Another lesson from WIATI is how the fundamental rule of US domestic spending, "Put the money where people can see it", is easily applied to security issues. Police sedans, helicopters, security checkpoints and the like stand out from the visual chaos of a modern city, at least partly for their novelty. This suggests that as citizens get used to their presence, ever more exotic and expensive “security elements” will be purchased with public dollars to maintain the picture of collective security through a powerful state.

Another lesson from WIATI is how thoroughly the US public has accepted the idea that criminals are essentially inhuman beings, to whom any treatment is acceptable and limited only by practical necessity and funding. The shock over the Abu Ghraib photos and the testimony of former Gitmo detainees was solely grounded in the exposure to non-US citizens of the normal conditions of US prisons. It was the shock born out of shame. The juxtaposition of US military uniforms, normally presented only in the context of blameless praise, or at least respect for force, with the cruelty of US correctional procedures was glaring enough to provoke a public whitewash of the former and a further burying of the latter.

Another lesson from WIATI is how a large segment of the US public is repelled and disgusted by stories of heroism and sacrifice. The repulsion and disgust is increased tenfold if those stories are of real events and if they involve people they consider their inferiors or peers. The problem for this segment of the public is that their automatic response to any achievement is to denigrate the achievement, point out hypocrisy, or in some other way suggest that the achievement was not worth the time and calories. Since pointing out hypocrisy and exposing false achievements is, in theory, a worthwhile endeavor, this response passes for "critical assessment" or "not just believing whatever you hear".

This attitude, however, has become the uncritical rejection of all achievement, all sacrifice, all heroism, as untenable and impossible. A flat undistinguished world of various kinds of obsessives who take no joy or pride in their obsessions, this is the endgame for this attitude, exemplified by a great deal of US television and Web media. In this world, the standing examples of heroism and self-sacrifice which appear in wartime are anathema. To believe that there are things worth killing for, worth dying for, is a primal sin to this attitude, and much of the shallow anti-war rants and musings should be seen as really saying "How dare you suggest that there's anything better out there?"

by Flipside

Vice president Biden appointed Thomas Nee, now President of the National Association of Police Organizations to his anti-gun task force, but Thomas Nee is exactly the kind of guy who would defend the stormtroopers who kick down your door and kill you in the act of arresting you for whatever they find/plant in your underwear drawer. You know, the guys the 2nd Amendment is here for so we can shoot them in self-defense after we shrug off the first concussion grenade?

Here is Thomas Nee's Track Record, compiled by a Bostonian, Robert Goodwin, aka Flipside: