Docsplaining

Dearest Rachel –

It should hardly come as a surprise that I haven’t watched any episodes of Doctor Who since your passing. There were, as you’ll recall, plenty of times in those last couple of years where, although it was fun enough for me to hunt them down online and collect them for you, getting me or Daniel to actually watch them with you felt probably more like pulling teeth than you would have liked. To be fair, once we started watching any given episode, we were just as well and truly into the show as you were, but too often there was this sense of obligation that came to having to watch the show. There were so many other things that we could have been watching that were a little more bite-sized and entertaining, in our various opinions. I kind of want to apologize for that – and I think we did on more than one occasion to you, so it’s not something that we need to regret not having done – but that’s how things went. More on that later, I think.

The reason I bring all this up is that, for whatever reason, I think I had a dream about the Doctor last night. Again, I couldn’t tell you much of the details, as it may not have been much of a plot – all I can remember at the moment is crawling through some of the typical BBC corridors, except they were closer in size to Hollywood-style air vents (hence the crawling) and had him? us? making our way through portals that would crisscross and double back like something out of M. C. Escher. In fact, I could look back (or maybe I was watching it on the television) and see us behind ourselves, except that we were coming in to the tunnel from a near vertical direction. The version of us back there moved when we moved, so we were watching ourselves in real time, only not where we were, but somewhere that we had just been, as if our route was part of a loop so infinite that we could see ourselves in multiple places behind us (I didn’t get a chance to see in front of us, so again, I may just have been watching the Doctor on screen). I hope that isn’t too confusing. Anyway, without a plot behind it, there’s not really that much more to tell, but it was an interesting scene nonetheless, as you might imagine.

In some respects, this seems like something that would be better than the sort of stuff being cranked out now on the actual program. As I said, I wouldn’t watch the show anymore, both out of respect for you and the fact that I never liked it as much as you did, but I’m also of the understanding that I’m not missing much anymore. In fact, in spite of it ending on a cliffhanger, with the Doctor in some sort of cosmic prison, your last episode may have been as good a point to leave off with as any, as it was the harbinger of the show’s decline. That particular episode sort of broke the fanbase, defying the long-established canon about Gallifrey and the Time Lords; to stop there before things got even more haywire might be considered a good decision (not that you had a choice in the matter)

Of course, it could easily be argued – and we took the position at the time – that what the Master was showing the Doctor could just as easily been him manipulating the Matrix to have the Doctor on. After all, if it was an established truism of the show that “the Doctor lies,” how much more so the Master, who is more obviously evil? Best to leave that question of the Doctor’s alleged origin hanging there, ambiguous, tantalizing, than wind up being told more of “the truth” by subsequent, inferior, stories.

Because, you see, while other intellectual properties, such as Star Wars, have been all, but destroyed over the past few years due to an insistence on bending their universe to fit the current zeitgeist, you are beloved Doctor has not been immune to this maltreatment. He’s actually been lectured – put down, condescendingly! – about not using a certain character’s or race’s pronouns on occasion lately. This, from a creative team that has literally rewritten the show to suggest that the character is older than our cosmos.

The thing is, the classic Doctors already had a certain know-it-all world-weariness that suggested that they had seen just about everything; this new Doctor, as written, should have seen and known everything that much more so. Heck, as early as the Third Doctor, there was a character by the name of Alpha Centuri (whether it was from there or not wasn’t made clear – and to be fair, it wasn’t a necessary detail) who sounded female, was described as male, and who the Doctor described to Sarah Jane as “more of an ‘it,’” in its presence (and it, being a member of a diplomatic delegation, either knew better, or was trained not to be offended by any misgendering). So even the biggest issue of the present generation is something that was dealt with by the show nearly fifty years before, and was no big deal at the time; the idea of it being a big deal now is ridiculous.

And what with the Doctor being rewritten to be the source of the Time Lords’ regeneration powers, he is virtually older than their species, and quite possibly, this cosmos as well. He’s seen it all, and done it all. The idea that anyone could (or should feel they have to) explain anything to him is absurd. There’s that much more of a reason for him to be dismissive of other races now than even during the classic era, given that it’s been that much more time that he’s been out there.

And you might notice that I’m using “he” to describe him, despite the fact that the last doctor you knew was Jodie Whitaker – a woman – he’s changed back to being a man. Several times, in fact – including a period where he returned to his Tenth incarnation as a Fourteenth? Fifteenth? I’ve lost track, since I’ve not bothered to watch it; even this felt like an attempt to regain hemorrhaging viewership (“Look! We got David Tennant back! Please watch us!”) – so… yeah. And it’s this Doctor to whom some other character felt the need to Docsplain to the one being in the universe who, according to the new canon, has been around longer than it has, and seen everything already. Really? I think you’d be getting annoyed by this, and you’d been following the show almost since you were born.

The irony of the showrunners doing this, while at the same time establishing this new canon for the Doctor’s origin, is that it undercuts their entire message. He’s been everywhere, seen everything, everywhere and everywhen. And yet, this creature insists on explaining something to him that he has an opposing position on. Now, I’m not saying that the Doctor is omniscient – he gets enough things wrong to allow a plot to happen, after all – but if a concept seems alien to him, what does it say about that concept? There’s only this miniscule corner of time and space in which characters are concerned about their pronouns, and after all this time, he’s not encountered it until now. I think that just suggests how weird our present day is. The writers surely didn’t intend it, but it rather suggests, even on an in-story basis, that this particular obsession is as singularly dated as bell bottoms and white people wearing afros (which today, among other things, would be roundly criticized as “cultural appropriation”).

Time, I suppose, will tell.

In the meantime, honey, keep an eye on me, and wish me luck. I’m going to need it.