A God, is he?

It’s time to start at the beginning. It’s time to open up the box and take a look at the madman inside.

He is a titan, bestriding the stars. He is the saviour of the universe, plucking thousands from the brink of disaster in the nick of time. He is the destroyer of worlds, annihilating all those who dare to spread the gospels of death and destruction. He is the immortal chess-master, moving pieces to and fro in a cosmic game. He is the last of his kind, a lonely god wandering the universe.

He is the Doctor.

Isn’t he?

There’s something of a debate on this point, you see. There are those who cry foul, who see this mythologizing as completely over the top and, worse, a complete departure from the essence of what makes out favourite Time Lord so compelling. And when we have the Doctor ascending heavenwards in the arms of a couple of (admittedly robotic) golden angels, you can sort of see their point. But – and it is a big but – the Doctor is a heroic character and, more than that, he is a superhuman hero. He is an alien, with knowledge and intellect that far outstrips that of any normal human, a whole host of fantastic abilities and the habit of coming back from death. However you look at it, he is the stuff myths are made of. In fact, that is exactly what he is. At least two species refer to him as the Oncoming Storm, his people were seen as gods by another and there is a whole universe of folklore centred on his actions. He is a legendary figure and has the skillset to match.

And what’s the problem with that? Well: what’s the fun of a character who can do anything? If the Doctor can fix everything with a wave of his hand, nothing matters. Everything will always come right in the end, so why bother watching? Luckily, writers are fairly good at seeing this one coming a mile off, so it is quite rare for the Doctor to pull a solution completely out of nowhere. And, let’s be honest, his frequent feats of scientific brilliance are – now – perfectly justified: as the 7th Doctor once said, it’s easy to rewire a piece of advanced alien technology in five minutes when you’ve had nine hundred years’ experience. In general, the Doctor is portrayed as being extremely knowledgeable with a knack for making things up as he’s going along and reacting to the circumstances, rather than as actually being omniscient. The only real caveat on this is that the Doctor is a time traveller. He knows the future as well as the past – in many cases, the future is his past – giving him an added insight into the events of a story. But this is allowed. After all, it is easy to make it as much a curse as a blessing.

There are, truth be told, very few instances where the Doctor ‘magics’ solutions out of thin air. Leaving aside Deus Ex Machina that come from outside without the Doctor’s direct influence, the endings that threaten to make him into a boring cure-all are blessedly rare. The destruction of the missile in Timelash is the only one that springs readily to mind. But there are many that have skirted close, where even the technobabble is little more than lip service to the idea that we’re not just watching an all-powerful wizard to whom nothing is a barrier. The ending of The Last of the Time Lords, with its ‘sparkly floating Doctor’ might be said to be more a case of ‘the writer spake and thus it was so’ than a well-thought-through ending. Trapped and beaten, our hero suddenly gains a new power that allows him to effortlessly break free and overcome his enemy. In one special effect, the Doctor has gone from a madman with a box (without a box) to physical godhood. And that is somehow less satisfying than, as the same incarnation once rather flippantly said, saving the universe with a kettle and some string.

The 2nd Doctor provides perhaps the best examples of world-saving without resorting to throwing lightning bolts. He fumbles through the denouement to his first adventure, beating the Daleks by pulling every lever on the control panel in front of him until they are all blown to high heaven by an overloading power grid (a trick, it seems, he remembered later). He mocks and undermines Klieg, niggling away at the man’s ego to induce carelessness. He disables the Ice Warrior’s homing beacon without them knowing, dashes about to stop them realising and then tricks them into cutting each other down. He rewires the Great Intelligence’s brain-drain device and would have destroyed one of his most powerful foes if it weren’t for his companions’ well-intentioned rescue attempt. On the Wheel in space, he used the equipment he had available to stop the Cybermen in their tracks, similarly foiling their invasion of Earth by employing UNIT’s vast resources. There were no handy get-outs here, merely honest bodging and a lot of comic antics to cover up a mind like a steel trap. And, fittingly, that is exactly why the Time Lords capture him with such ease. He is no all-powerful superhero – he is a man and, like all men, must be answerable to the higher powers he has defied.

This was not the last time the Doctor found himself helpless before those existing on a truly mythic level. The Pyramids of Mars finds him on the floor at the feet of an ancient and all-powerful god. Before Sutekh, our hero really is a grovelling insect and only eleventh hour trickery saves the universe from being devastated. Later, the Guardians, black and white, would emerge as higher beings; earlier, the Toymaker displayed awesome powers that, one on one, the Time Lord simply could not match. Nothing sums up the limitations of the Doctor in the face of these entities quite so effectively as the words of the Eternal who appeared in the form of Captain Striker during the race for Enlightenment. His response to being informed that the Doctor is a Time Lord? “Are there lords of such a small domain?” Compared to these higher beings, the man who has trounced hundreds of alien invasions is indeed a mere Ephemeral, which of course makes his victories over them all the more impressive.

And here we run up against the reason writers mythologise the Doctor in the first place. He has triumphed over powers far greater than his own. For all he might be the funny little man, the prattling jackanapes, his deeds tell a different story. He is nothing like as stupid as he tries to present himself. He has defeated gods and demons. He has driven back armies and stopped apocalypses. He has saved every planet in the known universe a minimum of twenty seven times. Even we, the viewers, who have seen the events unfold without the exaggeration, have to admit that this madman has done remarkable things. Is it any wonder that UNIT officers treat him with awe or that the Daleks are terrified to be in the same room with him? Frankly, it would be ludicrous if they didn’t. Unrealistic, one might say.

Does that matter? After all, whatever the press, he’s still going to be right there with the kettle and the string, muddling along. Just because people talk about him doesn’t mean that he’s not doing what he has always done: making it up as he goes along. But then you see him annihilating armies at the push of a button and trapping alien murders in mirrors and suddenly it does seem like he is the all-conquering goblin, not a mere wandering eccentric.

This isn’t a new phenomenon, of course. The 7th Doctor gets a reputation as the cosmic chess-master, though this is initially only partially justified. He did set traps and out-manoeuvre foes straight out of the realms of myth and magic but the element of making it up as he went along remained. There was another set of Daleks to deal with, random Nazis and if he knew what was really going on in the Greatest Show in the Galaxy before the final act, I’ll eat my panama hat. The traps were more elaborate but they bore more than a passing resemblance to those sprung by the Second Doctor, replete with amusing buffoonery and funny voices. But thanks to the Hand of Omega, we were introduced to the idea that he was involved with his own people’s past and by the time Fenric springs from his bottle, the Doctor looks increasingly like far more than just another Time Lord. The novels written after the TV show’s original demise reinforced this, painting the Doctor as an all-knowing, not-entirely-moral manipulator and, eventually, the reincarnation of one of the architects of his people’s power. The Time Lords too took on a more mythic edge, less squabbling old men and more asexual elementals, wired in to the heartbeat of the universe. Death Comes to Time went the whole hog and gave them genuinely god-like powers – that they dare not use, naturally. Back then, it wasn’t just what they were called: it meant something deep that should be spoken of with reverence. And the Doctor was the greatest Time Lord of all. His dead body was fought over, his guidance was sought and it was by his hand that his people were destroyed and remade.

With that kind of baggage, it makes perfect sense that he would become the lone survivor of a war that shook the cosmos. The destroyer of worlds, in a war against endless horrors, ending the conflict by wiping it from existence. A far cry from the strange old man in a junk yard with a doorway to adventure but perfectly in keeping with a member of a race that could erase planets simply by ignoring them.

Doctor Who’s mythology – a far, far more apt word than ‘continuity’ – is an unfortunate millstone around the neck of any writer on the series. On the one hand, it is rich and wonderful, full of interesting facets to conjure with. On the other, it lends itself to a lead character far beyond any kind of understanding and totally without decent hindrance. Of course armies run from him. Wouldn’t you? Not dwelling on it means we can have the same kind of adventures we had forty years ago, won by wit and ingenuity and general cleverness. But would that be true to forty years’ worth of depth? Hardly. Incorporating it gives us a richer, fuller universe to explore but risks undermining the very things that make the stories exciting: tension, drama, threat.

I don’t think there’s a solution to this dilemma. Making the foes bigger and badder certainly isn’t the way forward (though it can be done well). Neither is taking away everything that makes the Doctor so powerful a force for good (though this can be chilling). Turning the tables and having his reputation come back and bite him is not a trick that can be pulled too often and remain effective (though it has been done spectacularly well of late). The mythology exists, it cannot be ignored. Addressing it head on is a recipe for the Doctor ascendant. Deflecting it can only last for so long. And undoing it all is simply not an option. All I can say is that any writer hired to write for Doctor Who has their work cut out for them, especially if they intend to use that long and snarled history as part of their plots. If I have any advice, or felt I had a right to give it, it would be this: absorb as much of that history as you can but don’t feel as if you need to reference or explain any of it, don’t be afraid of adding to the history (because you really can’t make it any more complicated and contradictory than it already is) and, most of all, give us a Doctor who is fun to watch.

Because when you get right down to it, that’s the key. That’s why we’re here. Because of that crotchety old man, that cosmic hobo, that dashing adventurer, that boggle-eyed bohemian, that fair-faced Englishman, that blustering humanitarian, that funny little chess-master, that romantic alien, that emotionally scarred northerner, that lonely god, that madman with a box.

He is the Doctor.

And for good or ill, he’s really sort of marvellous.