What Doctor Who Season 12 Teaches Us About Life

I’m a huge Doctor Who fan, so I was very excited when my brilliant friend Mikey wrote this post for my blog! I know fellow Doctor Who fans will get a lot out of this post! It sure inspired me! In this guest post, Mikey discusses Doctor Who season 12 and what it teaches us about life. If you enjoy this post, make sure to check out his new blog.

It’s Christmas Day, 1914, the world is at war. All along the Western Front, thousands and thousands of young men die pointlessly, in aid of markets, or if you want to romanticise this senseless loss of life, ‘Freedom.’ Not one life was worth a single crying mother. But that’s my own value judgement.

And then suddenly, everyone stopped. The guns stopped firing and the children stopped killing each other and just for a short time, mothers didn’t need to cry. On this Christmas Day, everyone decided, just for a fleeting moment, to be kind.

An old man close to the end of his life decides to leave the battlefield. His life is coming to a close. Weary and alone, he had stubbornly refused to change. But the universe will not allow stagnation.

Exit stage left.

He enters the magical box. It’s now Christmas Day, 2017.

“Never be cruel, never be cowardly. Remember hate is always foolish, and love, is always wise.” He says.

“Always try to be nice and never fail to be kind. Oh, and you mustn’t tell anyone your name. No-one would understand it anyway. Except, except children. Children can hear it. Sometimes – if their hearts are in the right place, and the stars are too. Children can hear your name.”

Could you hear his real name? The greatest secrets are always hidden in plain sight.

“Laugh hard. Run fast. Be kind.”

The old man is transformed because he accepts that changing is the right thing to do in order to be kind to himself and kind to the people of the universe.

Now we have opened the door to new possibilities and we can tell new stories. We have the potential to tell better ones.

It’s 9th of February, 2020.

A middle-aged man, Graham, pours his heart out to The Doctor over his cancer fears. Seeking reassurance, hope, or perhaps even just a glimmer of kindness.

“I thought I should talk about it, because those nightmares made me realise the fear is still there.” He says. The Doctor looks at him, a blank expression covers her face.

“I should say a reassuring thing now shouldn’t I?” She responds.

“I’m quite socially awkward, so I’m just going to subtly walk towards the console and look at something. And then in a minute, I’ll think of something that I should have said that might have been helpful.” She turns away and walks towards the TARDIS console.

The logical side of my nature asks, “If she’s socially awkward why does she constantly throw herself into situations which involve people and situations which preclude being able to avoid intense social interaction? Why then, is this Doctor very much characterised in the mould of a heroic extravert (in the fashion of David Tennant)? Or at least that’s how she tends to play the part. And we’re supposed to buy into her being so awkward in social situations that she can’t even comfortably express herself around her best and closest friends? Yeah, there’s something not quite right there. And this was in an episode ostensibly about mental health, no less.

My inner child, who has watched this show since I was 9 years old asks: why couldn’t she just be kind to her friend?

What’s going on?

Doctor Who in 2020 is aiming for “realism,” and as a result has found itself in a strange purgatory of its own making. Yet, it can still tell us quite a lot about ourselves. Because this is a purgatory most people create for themselves every single day. The only difference is that in Doctor Who under current show-runner Chris Chibnall, the specific notion that this particular version of Doctor Who (seasons 11 and 12) is built on is much more noticeable.

The notion is, “Things are how they are and nothing can ever change or get better.”

Let’s jump back in time again. It’s 26th of March 2005. Doctor Who returns to British television screens for the first time since the failed TV movie on 27th of May 1996.

But unlike the TV movie which was heavily reliant on sci-fi tropes, what we get here isn’t exactly what, well, anyone, was expecting.

Instead of transporting us on to a space-ship or an alien world, we arrive in soap-opera version of everyday life. But when The Doctor drops in, this version of everyday life becomes folded into the framework of Doctor Who. The ordinary becomes extraordinary. I don’t think we really have to get in to how soap operas differ from realist drama. It’s certainly not the case that soaps are trivial or don’t deal with non-trivial issues, it’s that their version of realism is consciously unrealistic. The characters and story-lines derive their core essence from reality, but that core-essence is consciously exaggerated, which itself in turn becomes somewhat extraordinary.

What’s interesting then is that Chris Chibnall is firstly, clearly influenced by Russell T. Davies’ (who successfully revived the show in 2005) version of Doctor Who, but secondly and most crucially, he’s actually failed to understand it. What he thinks he’s doing and what he’s doing are two completely different things.

He’s actually achieved an inversion of Russell T. Davies’ vision of Doctor Who. Instead of The Doctor dropping in to an exaggerated version of ordinary life and folding it in to the extraordinary, conversely, Chibnall is folding the extraordinary into an exaggerated version of the ordinary through continually backing himself into a narrative corner. He does this by reducing the field of possibilities and limiting what The Doctor is capable of in pursuit of “realism.”

To make story lines such as Graham’s cancer fears work on a coherent level which resembles “real life” as closely as is possible, The Doctor must be stripped of the power to transform the fictional landscape and must be placed in to a landscape where a being with a magical box doesn’t belong. And thus we must accept that the magical box or The Doctor have no power in this landscape.

We can’t contiguously have a story which is both about a cancer sufferer portrayed as “real life” where some terrible things are simply fact of history and we must just accept and endure them with a stiff upper lip, and a story where someone from the world of the “imagination” who possesses the capacity to subvert and transform all of history through their magical box can simply transform the circumstances of this person and others, and make their life better. After all, a time-machine would allow you to take someone with cancer fears to a point in history where cancer has been removed as an existential threat.

And it is no coincidence that as a result we have a Doctor who is the most pointless and ineffectual in memory.

The thing is, on some level it’s not that this kind of story-telling couldn’t necessarily be worthwhile as drama. In the hands of someone who is doing a conscious inversion or critique of Doctor Who I’m reasonably sure it could be fairly interesting.

The obvious point of reference would be Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood, a series the current show-runner worked on as lead-writer,  which is a “gritty adult drama” about a bunch of ordinary people, where extraordinary things happen as part of their job, but then once the working day is over, they just get on with their ordinary lives. The important point to make is that in order for this to work Russell T. Davies made a conscious choice to ground lead character Jack Harkness – who makes a fleeting appearance in episode 5 of Doctor Who season 12 – by having The Doctor deactivate his ability to time travel. In order for it to work the magic box has to be removed from the game.

Obviously, in any show with sci-fi elements the magic box can be written back into play with a line if the plot requires it (or there’s a special coming up), but the point is, in order for the characters to be grounded in the ordinary rather than the extraordinary, then they must be subject to the ordinary human consequences of missing birthdays and restaurant bookings, and with that, people getting upset or angry at them. If they miss their favourite TV show, they have to go back and watch iPlayer.

The problem is, Chibnall doesn’t get this. He wants to have his cake and eat it. He’s writing a show where he’s practically insisting the characters must be subject to the reality of what he perceives as ordinary life. They have to deal with the consequences of missed birthdays and restaurant bookings. They have to watch iPlayer. Things are what they are and can’t be changed. But at the same time he wants to keep the magical box which can go anywhere and do anything. And this is central to the flawed nature of this vision of the show; you just can’t do both.

With this mode of story-telling, you can have, at best, a poor man’s version of Quantum Leap, where the “magical box” is just a conceit to drop a person into a different “real life” situation every week but there’s no real agency whatsoever as time-travel is subject to the whims of fate just like ordinary life. (This is the point of irritation for long time viewers who recognise how absurd this proposition actually is in terms of the context of Doctor Who).

At worst, we have a show which is past being in conflict with itself, and is now actively rejecting its own central premise, but wants to maintain the hollow shell (and it’s actually indicative on some level that in recent episodes, the interior of the TARDIS is no longer visible in external shots of the box whilst the doors are open) of Doctor Who. For all the show keeps telling us that The Doctor is extraordinary, it’s fairly difficult at this point to see how. She’s at best a kind of embodiment of automated capitalism: all she’s really there to do is press a button, pull a lever and then the machine does the rest and drops them off in a new location every week to play out the sort of “real life” in which The Doctor has no agency.

So what, you ask, has a show about a person with a magical box got to do with my life?

What has questionable story-telling got to do with my own circumstances? I live in the real world, you say, I haven’t got a time-machine for when I miss birthdays, restaurant bookings and my favourite TV show. Which is a fair question, I grant you.

Now here’s the plot-twist. You’re right.

But, how much of the story you’re telling yourself everyday is fiction? How much time do you spend thinking about the past? Or about things in the past you could’ve done differently? How much time do you spend imagining possible futures which never come to pass?

And if you’re the kind of person who reads Anna’s wonderful blog, I daresay you’re a person who spends more time in your own head telling yourself various stories than you do living in the moment, while not even bothering to look at your overly stuffed social-calendar. (If I am of course wrong about this, and you are a wealthy socialite who is for some reason attracted to portentous Doctor Who commentary and happen to be looking for a new boyfriend, let me know, strangely enough, my own diary isn’t so busy this month. I doubt this has any connection to  being someone who has watched Doctor Who since before puberty, and which absolutely wasn’t my own way of saying I want to be eternally single.)

But you’ve also missed the important thing.

The Doctor is someone who by mercurial nature changes stories. But The Doctor has never needed to use the time-machine to make things better. So you don’t need one either.

We as viewers just remain open to the possibility and understand that the capacity to do this is still implicit in the premise of what kind of show it is. The Doctor has always resolved the plot in what amounts to an equally satisfactory manner. Because that’s the kind of show it really is. We’re aware on whatever level that we’re watching a show about a being who is quite literally not captive to history. It’s a show about someone who just by entering the story brings an indefinite number of possibilities into play. We know it’s only a matter of time before The Doctor does something clever and makes everything okay and if all else fails, there’s always the time machine as a last resort (which we don’t really want The Doctor to use), but we’re happy to accept The Doctor isn’t going to need it anyway, because we have an understanding.

It’s not about someone who is becoming increasingly defined by pruning the tree of possibilities into an unassailable vision of “this is how things have always been, and this is how they have to stay.”

But I digress here, because the important thing to remember is, that now you can’t use the excuse of not having a time-machine for not improving your life. We always have the power to introduce new possibilities and change our stories any time we want. Just like The Doctor, you’re not a captive of the past, and you’re not a captive of the future either. You’re alive right now and that’s wonderful. Unless I’ve bored you to death (not so wonderful).

You can apply some trans-contextual thinking, and simply view any given situation from another perspective. Stories don’t have to be black or white, or fixed or even linear. If you’re not happy with the story you’re telling yourself, you can subvert the narrative and just tell a better one.

We’ve seen how an unwitting, slight shift in perspective turned a magical show about possibilities into a conservative doom-and-gloom narrative. But that’s alright, because there’ll always be Doctor Who stories and we can just write better ones. And if it’s possible to amend a perspective in order to write better Doctor Who stories, you’re more than capable of altering your own inner and outer stories too.

It’s 26th of June 2010. The universe is ending and the lights have gone from the sky. Meanwhile, there is a little girl who refuses to accept there’s no such thing as stars. Forty minutes later, that little girl is all grown up, just married and she’s just imagined her best friend, The Doctor, back into existence. We all need a best friend like The Doctor to show us that we can always change our stories into better ones and to remind us that anything is possible.