Bringing back the Who

  • Post last modified:Monday, December 12th, 2011
  • Reading time:3 mins read

People often criticize the last few years of Doctor Who’s original run. I get the surface complaints. The show had no budget or support from the BBC. It was produced in a rush. Nobody outside the core creative team wanted to work on it. Often the scripts overreached the talent and money available. It looked cheap. It felt neglected. Some people just don’t like Sylvester McCoy as an actor. Fair enough.

What confuses me is when people complain about Cartmel’s vision for the show. They say it’s “just not Doctor Who”, as if the show had ever been static. Well, beyond the doldrums of Tom Baker’s era and the early-mid 1980s. I’m guessing that’s what they mean, but that’s not how they explain it.

Their problem, as I often hear it, is in the portrayal of McCoy’s Doctor. Suddenly the Doctor is a puppet master; his mind is all in the future rather than the present, as he winds huge schemes around everyone and everything to achieve some goal of his own. This is overstating the case, of course; although the novels go nuts with this concept, in the show McCoy’s Doctor is more of an awkward professor. He tries to plan or anticipate situations, but he only ever sees the big picture and so spends most of his time reeling from the unexpected. The result is a strange little man who always seems to know more than he should, and who rarely steps forward to explain himself.

Thing is, that characterization has always been there to some extent. There’s a great deal of the Columbo to Troughton’s and Tom Baker’s portrayals, for instance; their Doctors allow everyone around them to underestimate them wildly, to allow them the space to explore or manipulate the situation behind the scenes.

Take Troughton’s handling of Klieg, in Tomb of the Cybermen. He allows the man to rant and assert his ego, while the Doctor scurries in the background to press buttons and work his own solutions. With his understanding of the situation, the Doctor could well have asserted authority and taken control — but that’s not his style. He would rather observe, and insert himself at key moments to change the course of events.

This is actually the trait that has always attracted me to the character; you never quite know how much the Doctor knows, and the supporting characters know even less of it. All you know is that he’s the most observant person in the room, and that his brain has already extrapolated things many steps beyond what’s in front of him.

McCoy’s portrayal just seems like a pointed example of this characterization — which may be why, for me, his Doctor feels like one of the most definitive. This is also probably why it has taken so long for me to accept more authoritative portrayals like Pertwee’s and Tennant’s; they lack that subversiveness, or at least neglect it by comparison.

This may be the first time I’ve compared Tennant to Jon Pertwee. Good grief.

Anyway. Cartmel’s era feels to me like an attempt to return the show to its 1960s roots — the subversive and ambiguous protagonist, who acts more as a supporting character to the companion; the ambitious scripts that explore broad social or theoretical concepts. I believe that Cartmel has said a few times that this was his intention, and I think it shows. Take out everything from Pertwee through Colin Baker, and I think the show progresses pretty seamlessly.