Zusammenfassung
Die heroische Titelfigur der gerühmten fiktionalen Serie Doctor Who, eines Ecks- teins des britischen Fernsehens und der populären Kultur, regeneriert geregelt, was zu Überlegungen über heroisches Erscheinen (und Verschwinden) anregt. Diese Prozesse sind nicht auf die Figur des Doctors beschränkt, sondern betreffen auch seine Ge- fährten. In der narrativen Struktur der Serie fungieren der Doctor und Gefährten als heroische Figur mit zwei Gesichtern. Ihre Anpas-sungsfähigkeit ermöglicht es in der Serie, um die Figuren und die Heldenbegriffe, die sie ver-körpern, ständig flott anzu- passen. Dieser Beitrag behandelt die Prozesse des ‚fading in‘ in den Momenten, wenn der Doctor regeneriert, sowie in den Augenblicken, wenn die Gefährten ge-wechselt werden; es wird gezeigt, wie diese vernetzten Zyklen von Kontinuität und Verände- rung die Serie als Ganzes sowohl interessant als auch vertraut machen.
Abstract
The eponymous hero of the acclaimed science fiction series Doctor Who, a cor- nerstone of British television and popular culture, regularly regenerates, inviting consi- derations of heroic (dis-)appearance. In fact, these processes are not limited to the Doctor but also include the line of companions at his side. Within the series’ narrative structure, Doctor and companion func-tion as a two-faced hero figure. Their adaptabi- lity allows the series to smoothly readjust the figures and the kind(s) of hero they em- body. This paper will consider processes of fading in both moments of regeneration of the Doctor himself and moments of change between one companion and another, and ultimately show how these intertwined cycles of continuity and change are used to keep the series as a whole both interesting and reassuringly familiar.
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Maria-Xenia H
ardtHero with Two Faces: Processes of Heroic (Dis-)Appearance in Doctor Who
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Hero with Two Faces
Processes Of Heroic (Dis-)Appearance in Doctor Who
Doctor Who is one of the longest-running programmes on British television and its eponymous hero, mostly referred to as simply ‘the Doctor’, has long been a cornerstone of British popular culture. A human-looking alien travelling through space and time in a Victorian police box, the Doctor offers everything one needs in order to create a series that simultaneously offers continuity and adaptability: The character regularly regenerates, which means that he is equipped with a new body and new personality while at the same time keeping a perfect memory, allowing the series to “embrace change, potentially keep current, and outlast (while never being entirely dependent upon) any one actor”,1 and thus ensuring its continued existence and celebration by a diverse audience. Each new incarnation of the Doctor has the potential to become a new kind of hero while retaining echoes and traces of the hero(es) he used to be.
The Doctor, however, had not originally been intended to be the show’s primary hero but a sidekick for the human protagonists, who depart from an ordinary everyday-life on a hero’s journey and return to normality thereafter, which has led to frictions between the series’ narrative structure and Joseph Campbell’s formulaic monomyth. While many products of popular culture such as Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter, that are otherwise very similar to Doctor Who, clearly follow Campbell’s concept of the hero’s journey, the ‘hero figure’ in Doctor Who is actually split between two characters, the Doctor and his companion. Thus not only the regenerations but also the change of companions can be discussed as instances of heroic (dis-) appearance. The dynamics of these processes become clear when considering the era of actor Matt Smith as the Eleventh Doctor (2010-2013). He enters the stage together with a new companion, Amy, and they adapt the figures to a new fairy-tale mode of the series. The loss of Amy – half of the heroic configuration – leads to an almost complete disappearance of the heroic, and only the appearance of Clara as a new ‘second half ’ leads to a heroic re-appearance. Finally, Matt Smith’s exit from the show and the regeneration into Peter Capaldi’s Twelfth Doctor are strongly mediated (and made possible) by the remaining companion Clara. The appearance and disappearance of Doctor and companion – whether jointly or separately – thus structure Doctor Who’s overall narrative, providing moments of closure and new beginnings, allowing the series to smoothly adapt its heroic figure(s) without breaking continuity.
1. Shawn sHimPacH, Television in Transition, Chichester, Wiley-Blackwell, 2010, 153.
1. Doctor Who and the Hero’s Journey in Popular Culture
The heroes and heroizations within popular culture, and their analysis, are thriving. The exploration of heroes in popular fiction has been used to “stimulate discussion concerning our contemporary values and attitudes, and the principles with which we navigate our way through life”.2 Not only does popular culture have the ability to “mark shifting values and norms as our societies experience economic, social, and other changes”,3 it also actively influences them by presenting to wide, often global, audiences an ‘approved’ version of who and what they should strive to be (like). Heroic figures are central to the exploration and negotiation of values and norms, as they test and transgress boundaries, work with and through challenges contemporary societies are facing and often represent better, more powerful, more exceptional and less ordinary potential versions of ourselves.
Within the field of popular culture, Doctor Who is in many respects situated close to novel series such as Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, with all of whom the BBC production shares various characteristics. Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings
“have revived the supposedly defunct tradition of heroic romance, behind which lies the ancient heritage of myth”, celebrating “courage, loyalty, kindness, love”.4 Similar to those two fantasy series, Doctor Who circles around grand world-saving narratives and, like Harry Potter and the hobbit Frodo, the Doctor operates within a team of friends and companions, driven by motives of love and kindness. Mike Alsford has argued that “one of the characteristic marks of the hero is what we might call their transcendental status”, that they are “chosen ones”.5 Being the chosen one includes a strong element of singularity, which resonates strongly in the figures of Harry, Frodo and the Doctor. The Doctor looks human but is in fact alien, beyond the reach of ordinary humans. He can regenerate, has two hearts and access to superior technology, most importantly his spaceship in shape of a police-box, the TARDIS, and his sonic screwdriver with which he can control technology from all ages. He overcomes boundaries of time and space, again and again answering calls for help and saving the world. In this sense, popular culture heroes like the Doctor, Harry and Frodo stand in the tradition of heroes of classical antiquity:
Surrounded by companions and friends, but themselves somewhere beyond that, as the chosen ones, between humans and gods, they continue in popular cultural products a century-long tradition of narratives as extraordinary, heroic figures, as modern myths.
These narratives all follow a similar pattern, described by Joseph Campbell as the hero’s journey, but the Doctor, while sharing a number of characteristics with other ‘chosen ones’ from the realm of popular culture, does not fit Campbell’s monomyth quite as neatly as Harry Potter or Frodo. Campbell’s theory of the monomyth describes the hero’s journey along the following lines: “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder:
fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes
2. Mike alsFord, Heroes & Villains, Waco, Baylor University Press, 2006, 2.
3. Norma jones, Maja bajac-carter & Bob batcHelor (eds.), Heroines of Film and Television:
Portrayals in Popular Culture, Lanham, Rowman & Littlefield, 2014, ix.
4. Christopher wriGley, Return of the Hero, Sussex, Book Guild Publishing, 2005, 2, 5.
5. Mike alsFord, Heroes & Villains, 26.
back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”6 In contrast to Harry and Frodo who at the beginning of their stories live common, ordinary lives, the Doctor is already extra-ordinary without a ‘normal’ life to leave behind or return to. He does not find out that he has super-human powers or that he is destined to save the earth – he has always known. It is instead the Doctor’s companions whose narratives follow Campbell’s pattern much more closely in that respect. They embark on a journey and find out that the universe is more than they thought it was. The Doctor, one could argue, functions as a mentor figure for them along the lines of Campbell’s theory. However, the Doctor remains far more at the centre of the narrative than other mentor figures (such as Tolkien’s Gandalf or Rowling’s Dumbledore), he shares the journey and the challenges along the way with the companion rather than just accompanying them in a more removed fashion.
Doctor and companion take turns in leading and following, in holding the other one back from rash acts, in reasoning and reassuring. The hero configuration of Doctor and companion negotiates the relation between exceptional and ordinary but rather than operating along a fixed hierarchy, they are two sides of the same medal, two faces of one hero figure in a narratively complex structure that has developed over decades.
The source for the friction between Campbell’s monomyth and Doctor Who can be found in the series’ original concept that did not project the Time Lord as its principal hero. The BBC’s “Notes on Background and Approach” reveal that not the Doctor but “Cliff ”, who would appear as Ian in the series, was intended to be the
“sensible hero” and was described, along the lines of a conventional male hero, as
“physically perfect, strong and courageous”.7 The Doctor, by contrast, should be “a frail old man, […] suspicious and capable of sudden malignance” whom Ian “never trusts”.8 Slightly later notes give the Doctor some more vigour, stating that he is in spite of his age “wirey and tough like an old turkey” which becomes clear especially
“whenever he is forced to run away from danger”.9 He is, however, still set apart from the other characters that “we know and sympathise with, ordinary people to whom extraordinary things happen”.10 As Dominic Sandbrook has pointed out, those ordinary people were designed to be “the real heroes of the story”, neatly fitting Campbell’s monomyth.11 Neither was the Doctor, in terms of narrative structure, intended to be the show’s primary protagonist nor was he assigned any characteristics, such as strength and courage, conventionally considered heroic.
Though he had not been intended as such, the Doctor eventually became the principal heroic figure of the series in a threefold manner: Firstly, he was moved more to the centre of the narrative structure when the male companion who had initially been intended as the main protagonist and hero figure was omitted and this
6. Joseph camPbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1971, 30.
7. “Dr. Who: General Notes on Background and Approach.” In: TV Drama Doctor Who General, folder T5/647/1. BBC Written Archive.
8. Ibidem.
9. Donald wilson, C.E. webber and Sydney newman, “Dr. Who: General Notes on Background and Approach for an Exciting Adventure – Science Fiction Drama Series for Children Saturday Viewing”, 16 May 1963, In: TV Drama Doctor Who General, folder T5/647/1. BBC Written Archive.
10. Ibidem.
11. Dominic sandbrooK, The Great British Dream Factory: The Strange History of Our National Imagination, London, Penguin Books, 2015, 392.
heroic potential transferred to the Doctor. While it was at first mostly the Doctor’s male companion who saved the female one(s), the Doctor, now often travelling with only one female companion, filled in as saviour of women and worlds. Secondly, his later incarnations were attributed more conventionally ‘heroic’ character traits.
Instead of being malignant and suspicious, he is kind and forgiving, refuses to use violence (most of the time) and has high moral standards; instead of running from danger, he is ready to give his life for others – both individuals and planet Earth.
Thirdly, the Doctor was increasingly associated and ultimately put in lineage with other monumental (British) hero figures, both implicitly and explicitly, both within the series itself and in its reception. Within the series, the Doctor has, for example, been compared to Robin Hood (“Robot of Sherwood”) and enacted Sherlock Holmes (“The Snowmen”), negotiating existing heroic prototypes in a process that Geoffrey Cubitt has described as cross-referencing, “connecting present heroes to the legendary heroic histories of their own communities”.12 In the reception of the series, both in academic treatments and media coverage, the Doctor is frequently named in line with other heroes prominent in the British national imaginary, such as Lancelot, Biggles, James Bond, and, again, Sherlock Holmes.13 He has thus become a hero along the lines of how Cubitt defines the figure, a product “of the imaginative labour through which societies and groups define and articulate their values and assumptions, and through which individuals within those societies or groups establish their participation in larger social or cultural identities”14.
In spite of transforming the Doctor into the heroic figure he had not initially intended to be, the character still does not (and never will) fit neatly into Campbell’s formulaic monomyth on his own. The ‘hero figure’ in Doctor Who is, as already mentioned, therefore split or, rather, two-faced, consisting of Doctor and companion who both contribute different parts of the configuration’s overall make-up. This split is mirrored in producer Steven Moffat’s almost contradictory statements concerning the hero of Doctor Who. In an interview with the Radio Times, he stated that “the Doctor’s always been a co-lead. He’s the hero figure but he’s not any more than a co-lead.”15 When defending his decision to cast yet another white male (Peter Capaldi) as the Twelfth Doctor instead of a woman and thus missing out on the chance to provide a role model for girls as well, he argued that the companions already covered that ground:
I don’t think the Doctor is the role model of Doctor Who. He isn’t. Because you can’t really base yourself on the Doctor. He’s off the spectrum, barking
12. Geoffrey cubitt & Allan warren(eds.), Heroic Reputations and Exemplary Lives, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2000, 5.
13. See for example actor Colin Baker stating in the Radio Times (17 Mar 1984) that “it is everybody’s dream to play their hero, whether it is Lancelot or Biggles or Doctor Who, because they are characters in modern mythology”; journalist Andrew Billen contrasting James Bond and the Doctor as “the two types of hero prevailing in Britain” (“When more isn’t less”, In: The Times, 7 July 2008); historian Domic Sandbrooks’s hit-list of British imagination “Made in Britain” in the Radio Times (31 Oct 2015), where he writes that “the Doctor has become one of the great fictional embodiments of Britishness, rivalled only by Sherlock Holmes and James Bond”; Sandbrook’s monograph The Great British Drean Factory: The Strange History of Our National Imagination prominently including Doctor Who alongside cultural products ranging from Shakespeare’s Henry V all the way to Harry Potter.
14. cubitt and warren, Heroic Reputations, 3.
15. Patrick mulKern, “Steven Moffat talks ratings, misogyny, casting Missy, Ashildr’s end game, the next companion and leaving Doctor Who”, in: Radio Times 2 December 2015, [online],
<http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2015-12-02/steven-moffat-talks-ratings-misogyny-casting- missy-ashildrs-end-game-the-next-companion-and-leaving-doctor-who/>.
mad, from space and has lots of mysterious abilities that we do not. How do you base yourself on that? The role model is actually the other character, his best friend.16
While on one hand, Moffat does see the Doctor as the ‘hero figure’ who has
“lots of mysterious abilities”, on the other hand he explains very neatly why the Doctor does not fit the hero figure, quite closely along the lines of Joseph Campbell’s theory, and promotes the importance of the companion for the series’ narrative make-up. Since its relaunch in 2005, the ‘new’ series has very much embraced the idea of a split hero figure, giving the companions considerable heroic agency of their own, far more than even the more ‘modern’ companions of the classic series (running 1963 to 1989) such as Elizabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith had.17 This has resulted in a great narrative complexity and flexibility: The hero’s journey of leaving home on a journey into the unknown, living up to challenges and returning now in fact consists of two cycles – that of the Doctor and that of the companion – which are sometimes parallel, sometimes intersecting but always intertwined.
With this flexible narrative structure, Doctor Who has found a way to stay interesting and variable in its constant oscillation between continuity and renewal that is so vital for the survival of a long-form narration like the TV series, keeping both the overall narrative and its engagement with the heroic fresh. As Frank Kelleter has argued, serial narration always operates along two basic impulses: the satisfaction of endings and the appeal and pleasure of renewal.18 In order to satisfy both needs, serial narrations tend to be multi-layered, with story threads being developed at the same time so that when one comes to an end, offering closure, another one can still be in full swing. In 1966, Doctor Who gained great flexibility by giving its eponymous hero the power to regenerate. The rise of the companions to equals at the Doctor’s side, forming a two-faced heroic unit at the heart of the series, doubled this flexibility and narrative force. The series can now be remodelled completely by replacing both characters at the same time, or make use of one familiar face to introduce another one that the audience might otherwise, without immanent mediation, reject. The two-faced heroic force in Doctor Who made up of the Doctor and his companion is constantly in transition, emerging, disappearing and re-emerging in a slightly altered way.
2. The Heroic Cycle of the Eleventh Doctor and his Companions
Since Doctor Who’s return to television in 2005 four actors have played the eponymous hero: Christopher Eccleston (2005), David Tennant (2005-2010), Matt Smith (2010-2013) and Peter Capaldi (2013-2017). Except for Eccleston’s Ninth Doctor, who only stayed on the show for one season, every Doctor was accompanied
16. Jessica rawden, “A Female Doctor on Doctor Who? Here’s What the Showrunner Says”, in: CinemaBlend 18 May 2015, [online], <http://www.cinemablend.com/television/Female-Doctor- Doctor-Who-Here-What-Showrunner-Says-71967.html>.
17. Lorna Jowett even argues that Doctor Who, in combination with its spin-offs Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adeventures “rebooted” its gender representations when returning to television in 2005, see Lorna jowett, Dancing with the Doctor: Dimensions of Gender in the Doctor Who Universe, London, I.B. Tauris, 2017.
18. Frank Kelleter, “Populäre Serialität: Eine Einführung”, in: Frank Kelleter (ed.), Populäre Serialität: Narration – Evolution – Distinktion: Zum seriellen Erzählen seit dem 19. Jahrhundert, Bielefeld, transcript, 2012, 13.
by various companions. However, each of them had one ‘signature companion’
who fit him especially well and whom he kept remembering and comparing later companions to even after their departure. Tennant’s Tenth Doctor and Rose, Smith’s Eleventh Doctor and Amy, Capaldi’s Twelfth Doctor and Clara formed especially smooth heroic configurations. The departure of these companions therefor alters the show and its central hero figure just as significantly as a regeneration. How both processes are intertwined can be well observed when considering the era of Matt Smith as the Eleventh Doctor. Over the course of three seasons and the 2013 specials, this era offers various appearances and disappearances that alter the series in different ways and its two-faced hero figure to varying extents. It begins with Smith’s entry into the series, includes the change of companion from Amy to Clara and ends with the next regeneration into Peter Capaldi’s Twelfth Doctor.
Every incarnation of the Doctor presents the opportunity to re-imagine the Doctor but at the same time, the producers need to keep the figure coherent enough for the audience to accept the new incarnation as a plausible representation of the Doctor. This twofold challenge has been dealt with in different ways in the moments of transition between the Tenth and Eleventh Doctor and the Eleventh and Twelfth Doctor respectively. When Doctor, companion and head writer all changed at the same time in 2010, the overall tone of the series was altered from modern and metropolitan to a more nostalgic fairy-tale mode, which both Matt Smith’s Doctor and his long-time companion Amy reflected. At the same time, however, the change was not accompanied by a drastic disappearance and re- appearance of the heroic. The heroic only faded when the companion, not the Doctor, left. The departure of Amy results in an almost complete disappearance of the heroic. The heroic then re-appears in a slightly altered form once the heroic configuration is complete again with the new companion Clara, and it is altered yet again after the regeneration from Matt Smith’s to Peter Capaldi’s Doctor. The latter breaks with the representation of the Doctor as a hero who helps humans because he likes them. This makes him at first glance less likeable and more difficult to access than his predecessors, and demanded for a different kind of fading process with the remaining companion Clara smoothing Capaldi’s entry into the series, serving as a mediator between an initially unsympathetic Doctor and the audience’s expectations. All these balancing acts between change and continuity deserve being looked at in detail.
Preceded by strong elements of closure upon David Tennant’s exit from Doctor Who, the beginning of Matt Smith’s era clearly marked a new beginning for the programme with a new Doctor, companion and producer, but did markedly not coincide with a disappearance of the heroic. In his final two-episode story fittingly called “The End of Time”, Tennant’s Tenth Doctor opposes his arch enemy, the master, and, in an act of self-sacrifice, rescues his companion Wilfred even though he knows that he will be severely wounded, accepting a painful regeneration. David Tennant’s end as the Doctor is not accompanied by processes of deheroisation, he instead leaves with one last extraordinarily selfless heroic act. “The End of Time”
dwells on this idea for a little longer: The Doctor, already weakened, visits former companions and heroically intervenes in their lives one more time. The Doctor then regenerates to the sound of a diegetic symphony, the universe “sing[ing him]
to sleep”.19 Loose ends are woven together, and the Tenth Doctor meets his end in a setting that has been central in the years with Russell T Davies as executive producer: run-down estate-housing dominated parts of London. This setting is then, quite symbolically, left behind in Matt Smith’s first episode. The first images are again of London, but this time from above, as the new Doctor not yet quite in control over his also renewing spaceship, the TARDIS, flies across the capital by night. After the opening presents the viewer with a new title sequence, logo and slightly adapted theme tune, the Doctor finally crashes in a setting radically different from the naturalistic urban one he departed from: an unkempt romantic garden with a small house, inhabited only by a little girl called Amelia Pond, which already sounds, as the Doctor says “like a name in a fairy tale”.20 The fairy tale motif very much sets the tone for this new Doctor. Rather than deheorising the Doctor before his regeneration and heroising him again in a slightly altered way, the series changes the surroundings, and the new Doctor and companion, like chameleons, adapt accordingly.
From the beginning, both the Eleventh Doctor and Amy are styled to fit the fairy-tale mode, altering but not revolutionizing the series’ hero figure. While in the first minutes of the episode, the Doctor tells Amelia he “[does not] know yet” who he is, he has begun to figure it out by the episode’s end: The Doctor is a dashing young man in a suit, complete with bow tie, which on the whole gives him a more serious yet nostalgic look in comparison to his modern and markedly metropolitan predecessors. Amelia, or Amy as she calls herself as a grown woman, waits for the Doctor’s return all her childhood, becoming “the girl who waited”.21 This companion – a curious girl in a secret garden who believes in stories and calls for help to fight the monsters in her room – similarly fits the fairy tale mode.
The ‘prince’ does come back eventually and steals his princess the night before her wedding day. The episode ends with several explicit mentions of this being the “beginning”, an adventure only starting, marking a new era for the overall programme.22 The changed environment, Doctor and companion all reflect new head writer Steven Moffat’s intentions to turn Doctor Who into a fairy tale. 23 The series is changed from the outside in rather than from the inside out. At the core, the hero configuration consisting of Smith’s Doctor and Amy is still driven by the motivation to make the world a better place, trying to save individuals (e.g. Vincent van Gogh in “Vincent and the Doctor”) and whole civilizations (e.g. the Silurians in “The Hungry Earth” and “Cold Blood”). Changing so many components of the show’s production (producer, Doctor, companion) was only possible because
19. “The End of Time” Part 2, Doctor Who, BBC One, 1 Jan. 2010, Television.
20. “The Eleventh Hour”, Doctor Who, BBC One, 3 Apr. 2010, Television.
21. Ibidem.
22. Ibidem.
23. Moffat, when taking over the show in 2010, said in an interviews that for him, “Doctor Who literally is a fairy tale. It’s not really science fiction.” (See Gareth McLean, “Steven Moffat: The man with a monster of a job”, in: The Guardian 22 Mar 2010, [online], <https://www.theguardian.
com/media/2010/mar/22/stephen-moffat-doctor-who>.) and described the new series both with the terms “dark fairy-tale” and “modern fairy-tale” (See Charlie Jane Anders, “Doctor Who’s Steven Moffat: the io9 interview”, in: io9 18 May 2010, [online], <https://io9.gizmodo.com/5542010/
doctor-whos-steven-moffat-the-io9-interview>.) When Capaldi replaced Smith as the Doctor, Moffat announced that the upcoming series “is not a fairytale”, linking that mode strongly to the Matt Smith era (See Ryan Britt, “Fairy Tale No More: Doctor Who is a Science Fiction Show Again”, in: TOR.COM 28 October 2014, [online], <https://www.tor.com/2014/10/28/fairy-tale-no-more- doctor-who-is-a-science-fiction-show-again/>).
Smith’s Doctor’s and Amy were made to be so easily likeable and familiar, not overwhelmingly different from their predecessor in their motivation and emotional set up.
Peter Capaldi’s Twelfth Doctor would by far not be as easily likeable and his character was more radically different from Smith’s. The disappearance of the Eleventh Doctor and subsequent emergence of the Twelfth Doctor, which changed the heroic formula of the series more fundamentally and ‘from the inside out’, was therefore prepared by the change of companion. Amy’s exit from the show led to a heroic disappearance, Clara’s entrance to a re-appearance in a slightly altered way already foreshadowing the radical change the hero figure would undergo upon Capaldi taking over as the Doctor.
The Eleventh Doctor first faded out as a heroic figure in his long-time companion Amy’s perception, who then completed her own hero’s journey by leaving the Doctor’s. In one of Amy’s last episodes as the Doctor’s companion,
“The God Complex”, the Doctor opposes a creature that attracts and then destroys people who strongly believe in something. Towards the end of the episode, the Doctor realizes that Amy is in danger because she believes in him, and so he has to shatter that faith. With the monster banging at the door, the Doctor only has moments to deconstruct himself as a hero in Amy’s perspective.
DOCTOR: I can’t save you from this. There’s nothing I can do to stop this.
AMY: What?
DOCTOR: I stole your childhood and now I’ve led you by the hand to your death. But the worst thing is, I knew. I knew this would happen. This is what always happens.
Forget your faith in me. I took you with me because I was vain. Because I wanted to be adored. Look at you. Glorious Pond, the girl who waited for me.
I’m not a hero. I really am just a mad man in a box. And it’s time we saw each other as we really are.
Amy Williams, it’s time to stop waiting. 24
When looking only at the Doctor’s words, this scene seems to completely deconstruct the Doctor as heroic figure. He has stolen Amy’s life although he “knew this would happen”; and his statement that “this is what always happens” implies that he has succumbed former companions to the same fate simply because he was “vain”
and needed someone to admire him. The confession culminates in the Doctor’s avowal that his “not a hero”, which is intensified by the juxtaposition of “hero” and “mad man in a box”.
However, this scene becomes a lot more complex when looking not only at the dialogue but also at the filmic techniques, which very strongly portray the Doctor as a hero, making clear that the fading out of his heroic status only happens in Amy’s perception. The scene is dominated by close-ups of the Doctor from a slightly low angle, a filmic technique conventionally used to establish a character’s power, dominance and control over a situation.25 These shots alternate with close- ups of Amy, and the shot-reverse-shot sequences create the impression that the
24. “The God Complex”, Doctor Who, BBC One, 17 Sept. 2011, Television.
25. Michael ryan & Melissa lenos, An Introduction to Film Analysis: Techniques and Meaning in Narrative Film, New York, Continuum, 2012, 58.
camera, when showing the Doctor, is mimicking Amy’s perspective, which implies that the deconstruction of the Doctor as a heroic figure only happens from Amys’s perspective, filtered through her consciousness. The uplifting music, orchestral with a choir and elements of bells, picks up the fairy tale mood the Eleventh Doctor was introduced with and thereby implies for the audience that in this moment, the Doctor still is a hero embedded in that mode. What appears to be a deheroisation when looking at the words only really turns out to be another heroic sacrifice on the Doctor’s part: As he explicitly states later on, he sacrifices Amy’s faith in him. He says he cannot save Amy but does exactly that, claims that he is “not a hero” while the camera angle and music as well as his knowing smile as the monster recedes suggest the opposite. In Amy’s perception, however, the Doctor fades out as a hero, and although Amy returns as a companion for a few more episodes after this one,
“The God Complex” initiates her farewell from the series. References to their first episode, such as shots young Amelia on her suitcase looking out of the window, the Doctor calling Amy “the girl who waited” and himself “a madman in a box” work as elements of closure for the joint narrative of the Eleventh Doctor and Amy.
The Doctor finally loses his long-time companion a few episodes later on, resulting in him being alone and on his own for real. Having lost Amy and questioning his own role in the events that led towards this loss, the Doctor faces a severe crisis. While the Doctor’s regeneration did not shatter the series’ hero-figure, the loss of one half of it results in just that. He withdraws to his TARDIS, which can be read as a return home along the lines of Campbell’s concept of the hero’s journey. He disappears as a heroic figure in performance, and only the introduction of a new (potential) companion, Clara Oswald, leads to a re-emerging of the Doctor as an altered hero again.
The beginning of season seven’s Christmas Special, “The Snowmen” is in line with the fairy tale mode but the Doctor does not (want to) fit in any more:
In opposition to “The Eleventh Hour”, where he answered Amy’s call for help, he does not want to get involved, let alone save anyone, disappears instead and only re- appears as a slightly more rationale-driven hero inspired by his mocking enactment of Sherlock Holmes. “The Snowmen” is set in a snowy Christmas-time Victorian London, which looks like an idyllic powdery-white fairy-tale. The Doctor himself, however, has parked his TARDIS on a cloud above the city, “vowing never to save the world again”.26 He has given up being a hero, he is not even wearing a bow tie, his most prominent signature piece of clothing. The cloud on which he has parked his TARDIS and where he spends most of his time literally makes him disappear, become invisible. Throughout the first half of the episode, the Doctor repeatedly states that saving the world “isn’t the thing [he is] doing any more”.27 He says “it is none of [his] business”, that “the universe doesn’t care”, and that the sinister Doctor Simeon, the episode’s villain, trying to take over the world is “not his problem”.28 Madame Vastra, a recurring character and friend of the Doctor, tells Clara that “the Doctor is not kind. […] He was different once, a long time ago. Kind, yes. A hero, even. A saver of worlds. But he suffered losses that hurt him.”29 Both explicit self- and
26. “The Snowmen,” Doctor Who, BBC One, 25 Dec. 2012, Television.
27. Ibidem.
28. Ibidem.
29. Ibidem.
altero-characterization as well as the visual characterization through the metaphorical disappearance into the misty clouds mark the fading out of the Doctor as a hero.
The appearance of Clara Oswald and the mystery she embodies revives the Doctor’s curiosity and restores him as a heroic figure. Several versions of Clara are scattered throughout time because – and this is only revealed in “The Name of the Doctor” shortly before the Doctor’s next regeneration – she has sacrificed herself for the Doctor by jumping into his timeline, which split her once coherent self into several versions that turn up again and again to save the Doctor. When the Doctor first shows interest in Clara (whom he has met in other versions of herself before) in “The Snowmen”, Madame Vastra remarks that it is “refreshing to see [him] taking an interest again”, and although the Doctor objects telling her “those days are over”, she insists that he “can’t help [himself]”.30 It is Clara who convinces the Doctor to come down from his cloud to help them fight Doctor Simeon and his snowmen-monsters. The Doctor makes his first heroic appearance dressed as Sherlock, is announced to Simeon under that name and enters to the sound of a variation of the theme tune of the BBC series Sherlock. The combination of explicit references, costume, rapid but senseless ‘deductions’ on the part of the Doctor and the Sherlock theme tune satirizes the Sherlockian hero figure. Making use of a hero concept radically different in his rationality from the Eleventh Doctor’s previous fairy tale-inspired heroic self offers a possibility for the Doctor to emerge as a hero again without falling back into his previous heroic demeanour on which he at least partly blames the loss of Amy. The Doctor then combines this ‘new’ kind of heroic behaviour with elements of his previous heroic self, returns to using the sonic screwdriver and wears a bow tie again. Showing the Doctor’s return from the isolated cloud to heroic action is accompanied and supported by Clara’s explicit claim that the Doctor has “been on holiday” but has “now returned to work”.
After the Doctor reclaims his own agency, Clara as a new companion completes the two-faced hero figure again and marks the completion of their joint heroic (re-)appearance. This becomes especially evident when, after facing Simeon in the first round of good versus evil, the Doctor gives Clara a key to the TARDIS.
He asks Clara to “remember this. This right now, remember all of it. Because this is the day. This is the day. This is the day everything begins.”31 The repetition of
“this is the day”, accumulating toward the climactic “begins” and accompanied by the Doctor enthusiastically moving through the TARDIS to set it back into motion, stresses the importance of that moment for his heroic re-appearance. When the Doctor has found a new companion in Clara, someone to give a key to the TARDIS to, he is ready to leave the cloud, signalled by a rhetoric of starting anew similar to the one used after the regeneration. Shortly before Clara dies in this episode, the Doctor tells her: “We saved the world, you and me”, and promises, “no more cloud”, which explicitly connects the two of them teaming up for heroic action (“we”) with the Doctor leaving his temporary exile, ready to embark anew on a hero’s journey.32
Clara’s death only stops the Doctor for a moment. He then realizes, making use of the rational deduction skills he has added to his heroic portfolio through
30. Ibidem.
31. Ibidem.
32. Ibidem.
imitating a Sherlockian hero figure, that he has met other versions of Clara at other points of time, assuming that she is still alive in some version of herself, and decides to go on a quest to find her at the end of the episode. He races back to the TARDIS, sets it in motion while shouting “Clara – Oswin – Oswald”, followed by a prompt directed at the audience: “Watch me run!”33 The latter is combined with a breaking of the fourth wall, which is something that rarely ever happens on Doctor Who, and which is not only a promise to Clara but to the whole audience: He is ready to face the world again, and Clara Oswald is literally what gets him moving again.
The new companion not only leads to a heroic re-appearance but also alters the kind of hero the Doctor is. When he promises Clara that there will be “no more cloud” for him, this can be read not only as a good-bye to his holiday from saving the world but also already as a small good-bye to the fairy-tale version of the Doctor.
As has been pointed out before, the Doctor reappears as a slightly more rationale- driven hero after his mocking impersonation of Sherlock Holmes. In addition to that, Clara is from the beginning taking matters more in her own hands than Amy:
She is not the ‘girl who waited’ but the ‘impossible girl’. Clara has her own story, her own mystery and the Doctor spends half an episode travelling through her past to figure it out. For once, the companion takes the Doctor on a journey (one through her past) rather than the other way round. On their first journey together in “The Rings of Akhaten”, Clara reminds the Doctor, “We don’t walk away.”34 It is Clara who makes two major sacrifices to save the day. The introduction of a new companion alters the Doctor. The fading out upon the loss of one companion allows for a smooth adaptation when emerging again as a heroic figure – a more rational one, and one who operates as part of a team with an independent counterpart who from the beginning shows great potential for agency – rather than waiting. This change in the architecture of the two-fold hero-figure already foreshadows the transition from the Eleventh to the Twelfth Doctor, and the new companion is introduced just in time to smooth out the regeneration.
In “The Name of the Doctor” and “The Time of the Doctor”, the Eleventh Doctor repeatedly finds himself on the planet Trenzalore where he is supposed to find his end, having used up all regenerative energy, but then regenerates after all following several heroic acts of self-sacrifice and devotion both by himself and Clara. His end is by no means connected to a disappearance of the heroic – rather, both the Doctor and Clara are at their most heroic, selflessly saving their friends, the universe and each other. The episodes, which are connected by their similar titles and shared setting, treat both characters as true equals. Clara states several times that she was “born to save the Doctor”. 35 The latter decides to go to Trenzalore despite thinking that this is where he will find his grave, and against the will of the TARDIS.36 When the Doctor is “rewritten” because the Great Intelligence interferes with the traces he has left in time and space, Clara throws herself into the stream of light to save the Doctor – and along with him all the “lives […] and worlds” whose existence is threatened by the rewriting of all the Doctor’s heroic deeds.37 Similarly
33. Ibidem.
34. “The Rings of Akhaten”, Doctor Who, BBC One, 6 Apr. 2013, Television.
35. “The Name of the Doctor”, Doctor Who, BBC One, 18 May 2013, Television.
36. Ibidem.
37. Ibidem.
to Clara, who says that she is “always […] running to save the Doctor again and again and again”, he in turn tells Madame Vastra that he has to “get her back”.38 When Clara protests, he asks her to “just this once, just for the hell of it, let [him]
save [her]”.39 All throughout the episode they save each other, their friends and the universe. After a detour from the Trenzalore-storyline in “The Day of the Doctor”, where Clara helps the Doctor come to terms with the darkest moments of his past, the Doctor and Clara continue to save one another in “The Time of the Doctor”.
The Doctor sends Clara away against her will to save her, yet she finds a way to come back nevertheless to save him in turn by convincing the Time Lords to equip him with new regenerative energy. Without the strong urge of both Doctor and Clara to save each other, and their friends, and the universe, the Doctor would have indeed met his end on Trenzalore. Instead, he regenerates once again.
The regeneration in itself provides strong elements of closure that lay the ground for yet another new beginning. When the process has already started, the Doctor eats as his significant last meal a bowl of fish fingers with custard, has a vision of Amy who calls him “raggedy man”, all allusions to this incarnation’s first episode “The Eleventh Hour” providing closure. Before he transforms, the Doctor delivers one last speech about the importance of change to give himself and Clara the strength and hope needed for the regeneration:
DOCTOR: It all just disappears, doesn’t it? Everything you are, gone in a moment, like breath on a mirror. Any moment now, he’s a-coming.
CLARA: Who’s coming?
DOCTOR: The Doctor.
CLARA: But you, you are the Doctor.
DOCTOR: Yep, and I always will be but times change, and so must I. […] We all change, when you think about it. We’re all different people all through our lives. And that’s okay, that’s good, you’ve got to keep moving, so long as you remember all the people that you used to be. I will not forget one line of this.
Not one day. I swear. I will always remember when the Doctor was me. 40
This speech about embracing everything and everyone one used to be while at the same time accepting and allowing for change puts the formula of how the series manages to intertwine continuity and renewal into a nutshell. Similar to the Tenth Doctor, the Eleventh Doctor’s end is not a fading out of his heroism but a last manifestation of the latter combined with strong elements of closure.
The Twelfth Doctor’s first episode, then, is frustrating but keeping Clara as a companion serves as a bridge between the old and the new Doctor. First of all, the setting is a familiar one, that of Victorian London, the same one used in
“The Snowmen”. The Doctor is completely distraught: His clothes are dirty and ragged, he often acts irrationally, he is, as Madam Vastra puts it, “lost in the ruins of himself ” and it is Clara’s job to “bring him home”.41 A comparison between the Eleventh and Twelfth Doctors’ post-regeneration confusion shows how different
38. Ibidem.
39. Ibidem.
40. “The Time of the Doctor”, Doctor Who, BBC One, 25 Dec. 2013, Television.
41. “Deep Breath”, Doctor Who, BBC One, 23 Aug. 2014, Television.
they are from one another and why the latter needs a softer transition aided by a familiar companion: While the Eleventh Doctor was a little confused about what kind of food he liked and kept wondering what clothing style would suit him, he did so in a charming, innocent and slightly naïve way, making him instantly likeable and sympathetic. The Twelfth Doctor on the other hand is constantly grumpy, insults others, and wanders around night-time London in a ragged nightgown like a maniac. Even Clara struggles to recognize the Doctor as whom he is and needs almost a full episode to live up to Madame Vastra’s request that she bring him home.
Only at the very end of the episode, Clara becomes, quite literally, a link between the Eleventh and Twelfth Doctor when she receives a phone call from the former shortly before his regeneration. When Clara asks the ‘old’ Doctor why he is calling her from the past, he asks her to help his future self:
DOCTOR: I think you might be scared. And however scared you are, Clara, the man you are with right now, the man I hope you are with, believe me, he is more scared than anything you can imagine right now and he, he needs you.
[…] Clara, please, hey, for me, help him. Go on. And don’t be afraid. 42
The ‘old’ Doctor asks Clara – and the audience – to give the new one a chance. The new Doctor then steps out of a renewed TARDIS, clean and in new clothes, changed, older for sure, but already by the side of a companion, one that is reminded not to be afraid and one that actually suits him: The Twelfth Doctor is far more cynical than the Eleventh, and if Clara as a more self-confident, more equal companion, instead of the ‘girl who waited’-princess Amy impersonated, cleared away the fairy-tale heroism to some extent, that is now gone altogether.
The Twelfth Doctor is fierce, in fact, he is a little intimidating. However, having introduced Clara as a new companion before, just in time for the audience to get to know her enough to be confident she can handle this new Doctor, the series can afford a Twelfth Doctor not as readily sympathetic as the Eleventh.
The heroic in Doctor Who is always in motion. Sometimes, as when Matt Smith took over as the Doctor, it is transformed from the outside in by changing the overall mode of the series. At other times, the heroic disappears completely, as it happened when Amy left and the Doctor did not function as a hero figure on his own, to then re-appear in an altered fashion. Finally, as the regeneration into Capaldi’s Twelfth Doctor showed, a radically different Doctor can also transform the series from the inside out, a change so drastic that it needs mediation through an already familiar companion. In addition to these manifold processes of heroic disappearance and reappearance, the series also negotiates the concept of the ‘hero figure’ as a whole – not by letting it fade but rather by diffusing it: Neither the Doctor nor the companion neatly fit Campbell’s monomyth on their own, rather, they each contribute different facets of the hero figure. The companion, in contrast to the Doctor, provides a home to depart from and return to. The Doctor works as a foil for national imagination, consciously standing in line and working through other British hero figures such as Sherlock Holmes. Both can act heroically, sacrificing themselves and what is dear to them selflessly to save other individuals, worlds, civilizations, and one another.
Together, they are constantly in motion, exploring not only space and time but also
42. Ibidem.
different kinds of heroes they can be and become. As the Eleventh incarnation so nicely put it, he will always be the Doctor – but times change, and so must he.
Maria-Xenia Hardt University of Freiburg
