Doctor Who: Child of the Enlightenment

This weekend Doctor Who celebrates his fiftieth birthday. “Ha!” cries my nine-year-old self. “Any Whovian can tell you that he’s actually somewhere between 900 and 1200 years old!” Current Who writer-in-chief Steven Moffat maintains that the Doctor probably lies when asked about his age. At any rate, 23 November marks fifty years since the show was first broadcast. Since then, eleven actors have played the Doctor, a roving alien who moves through time and space in his time machine, the TARDIS (Time And Relative Dimensions In Space). It’s been quite a journey.

Like a soccer fan enduring years of lower-division heartache, I was a Doctor Who fan through the barren age. Too young to remember it first time round (the original series was cancelled in 1989), I caught repeats on TV, bought videos of old adventures, and raided charity shops for novelisations. When I was nine I won a school fancy-dress competition (the theme = my hero) as the fourth Doctor, complete with scarf and Jelly Babies (see picture). It felt like only I celebrated the thirtieth anniversary in 1993, and ratings for the TV movie in 1996 weren’t sufficient to kickstart a new series. Anyway, so it’s great to see the fiftieth getting so much attention. Google have done a special Doctor Who doodle on their UK homepage, The New Yorker got in on the act with a long feature (subscribers only), and, appropriately, even TIME pulled out the stops with a beginner’s guide to the world’s favourite Time Lord.

In a move ironic to those who remember with affection the wobbly sets of the 70s, the special episode broadcast on Saturday (“The Day of the Doctor”) will showcase British tech savvy at its best. The visual effects have come a long way from the DIY spaceships of the Colin Baker era. And the method of broadcast is unprecedented for a British TV show: aside from being shown in both 2D and 3D on BBC One in the UK, it will be simulcast on TV stations around the world (including BBC America at 2.50pm EST). It will even screen in 3D at some cinemas – including here in New York.

What’s kept affection for the Doctor alive over fifty years, though, is the character himself. My colleagues at the Embassy in DC have put together an excellent Buzzfeed on the Doctor as a universal diplomat, and there’s a lot of truth in what they say. He embodies many of the qualities and values modern Britain is rightly proud of. Over the years, his travels in time and space have introduced him to hundreds of species and cultures, both peaceful and warlike, civilised and not. Although his personality has jumped around between incarnations, there is a consistent thread. The Doctor’s is an approach very much in line with Enlightenment values: rationalism and scientific inquiry, democracy and liberty. The best stories in the show’s history depict the Doctor grappling with gigantic moral quandaries alongside the more literal battles with the likes of the Daleks and the Cybermen. “Genesis of the Daleks” (1975), one of the best and most famous of the original serials, is a great example. In it, the Doctor is faced with one of history’s great what-ifs: can he justifiably halt the development of the Daleks at an early stage knowing what he does about their future tyranny, or is this in itself an indefensible act of genocide? (In the event, the opportunity to stop the Daleks passes and the rest is history as we know it.)

Much of the Doctor’s appeal lies in his being an anti-establishment figure: he defies the Time Lords to do what he thinks is right; they reluctantly permit his freedom in return for his crisis management skills (as in 1983’s twentieth anniversary special, “The Five Doctors”). This is what makes him such a child of the Enlightenment. Unafraid to speak out against authority, unwilling to accept the status quo if it means suffering for many, he almost invariably leaves a planet better off than when he arrived. This is what made him my hero when I was nine, and why he remains a hero to millions of people today. His transcendent open-mindedness has kept him from getting old (although he is, as discussed, VERY old) and the show’s in-built flexibility has allowed it to regenerate along with the Doctor, reflecting our aspirations in 2013 just as much as it did in 1963.

I shall leave you with the Doctor’s final words in the original series, from 1989’s “Survival”, as he and his companion Ace stroll off back to the TARDIS. For me, they pretty much sum up his very British style of heroism: “Somewhere there’s danger, somewhere there’s injustice… and somewhere else the tea’s getting cold. Come on, Ace. We’ve got work to do!”