DOCTOR WHY ?

 

Why do I love Doctor Who so much?

 

This text, as its title clearly and with no subtlety whatsoever indicates, is an attempt to explain the reason that’s led me to throw my heart and soul into the series Doctor Who for the past fifteen years. Yes, my passion for Doctor Who is entering its GCSE years, or A-levels, well, secondary school anyway.

 

I could list many concrete reasons that make me enjoy the series like plenty of others do. The improbable variety of stories. The constant desire to highlight positive feelings. The diverse and varied characters. The play between dreams, imagination and reality. The quaint but charming side of slightly old-fashioned England.

 

I could just as easily list reasons why I shouldn't like this series. The lone hero aspect. The parallels between the Doctor and the Catholic God. The clear influence of a post-colonial society, where white heroes save peoples foreign to them by bringing them “enlightenment”. And the rotten subtext of the latest episodes. But also the blatant sexism of the ‘companion’ concept and all sorts of outdated values.

And yet… Everything that would put me off in so many other programs keeps me gripped here. So why is that?

 

When I started the series, you should know that I didn’t want to watch it. I’d vaguely come across descriptions online, a few images. It was 2009, I was starting university and was mostly binge-watching Friends and loads of movies. I was discovering a whole new world of cinema when I arrived in Paris—screenings in their original languages, films from every country. There was a man selling cheap DVDs every Tuesday at the market below my flat, and I was discovering gems that were new to me at the time, like In The Mood for Love or Farewell My Concubine.

 

And I was still a huge pop culture fan, just broadening my horizons. Except that Doctor Who was THE show that really didn’t appeal to me. It looked naff. Badly made, ugly, daft. Yet my brother kept talking to me about it—he’d seen the first four series of New Who and had loved it. But I thought I had better things to watch. Yet one day, he lent me the first series of New Who. One evening, as I was heating up some potato mash in the microwave, I put on the first episode. The mystery surrounding the Doctor popping up in different eras intrigued me at the time. I liked the character of Rose, who was about my age then (well, slightly older), and I could really relate to her. And then the Doctor gave his speech about feeling the cosmos, the Earth spinning beneath his feet and BAM—I was blown away.

 

I devoured the series and went back to my brother saying: um, give me the rest, and hurry up. I was hooked. Even more than he was, in fact.

 

After fifteen years, I’m starting to work out why I love Doctor Who —and not just the good episodes, but the bad ones too, even the worst, even those that go against my own values. I’m someone who goes through depressive phases. I struggle to like myself as I am. Guilt is what I know best, for anything and nothing, and yet I’ve never broken the rules because just imagining it stresses me out for decades. When the world is going badly (so, most of the time), when my family or friends aren’t doing well, when I feel like a bad person because of that trauma-triggered guilt, I feel like my life is going to stop. I feel like either we’re all going to die, or I’m going to die, or I’ll have to withdraw from society. Suddenly, I lose all hope. It’s a feeling of an extraordinary, unfathomable, violent depth. It’s utter darkness. It’s as if suddenly there’s no future and the past had always been dreadful in every way. I know it’s my mind playing tricks on me in those moments, but knowing that rationally doesn’t stop me feeling it. I feel the certainty of something always going wrong all the time.

 

Doctor Who for me, represents impermanence—not in its substance, but in its form. And that gives me hope. In its substance, of course, many episodes are about hope. But there are still plenty of bad episodes. The fact that it’s a show that chooses not to stop, that says that whatever happens, it carries on. Even if the character changes their face, even if the stories contradict each other, even if the values are temporarily wrong, even if there’s no more budget, even if it stops for fifteen years or more. It’s a project that says no to the end of the future. What I personally take from it—and this is just my own feeling—is that Doctor Who always says that yes, there will be a future—perhaps not the best one, perhaps the best, perhaps in a long time, perhaps tomorrow, but there will be a future. The form of the series doesn’t sell me a fake hope where everything will always be the same in some search of nostalgia for a good old time that never existed. Even in its worst moments, it has managed to carry on. Because the people who love it have managed to keep it going. Because nothing is permanent, everything changes, nothing stops, everything keeps going.

 

The future of the series is its past, with episodes to be rediscovered or rebuilt; it’s its present, with all sorts of parallel stories in audio, books, comics, and more; and it is its future, with all the potential yet to come. When Robert Shearman said that Doctor Who had never been so dead as after the last shot of The Reality War, I completely understood what he meant. But even if that had been the series’ last shot, let’s just imagine what it would have meant : the show would have ended on a shot that once again said that no, there is no end, and no, it’s not something that’s already been done. That doesn’t mean it’s a good choice or not, I’m really not talking about that at all. But about the energy that comes from that act. Whatever the motivation.

 

So that’s why Doctor Who is my greatest passion. Unlike so many other programs—and I’m a proper film buff and binge-watcher—I know that even when Doctor Who disappoints me, I can't wait to watch the next episode, I look forward to the little bit of info that’s coming. It brings me closer to the hope inside me, which can sometimes fade. It allows me to tell myself that even when everything is going wrong, it means I’m alive, the world is alive and it will carry on, no matter how, because that bit is out of my control. It reminds me that everything is impermanent.

nel