means the blog came from nowhere

The War Games, a second doctor story and the second ever regeneration story, is never called back to in the same explicit way as the Curator or Bad Wolf or casual references to that time the Doctor wore celery, but it is a deep dark scar in the very fabric of Doctor Who's continuity. The Doctor's relationships with his companions change afterwards, growing more protective and possessive of them to a disastrous degree. After our first intro to the Time Lords our understanding of our heroes origins is reframed and colored in a new way. "A man is the sum of his memories, a Time Lord even more so" reveals to us that while our hero frequently changes faces, it's the history he carries with him that defines him as Doctor Who, and "if no one watches, Dr Who will kill himself." When Jamie and Zoe's memories of the Doctor are wiped it is a violation of the story itself, because if their adventures with the Doctor is wiped from their minds, then Doctor Who is taken out of their lives, and they are essentially exiled from the narrative. That's why the Doctor never revisits Jamie and Zoe AFTER their punishment. The Doctor does not exist in their reality. They're not in the same story as him anymore.

Mozart (Currently shredding Violin Concerto No. 1 on the guitar, having figured it out within 30 seconds): What other music can be made from harnessed lightning?

they’re both in the business of searching for a precedent finding an analogy locating a prior example so as to be able to say this terrible thing we’re witnessing now is not unique you know it happened before or something much like it we’re not at a loss how to think about this we’re not without guidance there is a pattern (anne carson, antigonick)

this finding of a precedent is necessarily a perusal of the past. or future. remember there is so much of both in the case of the doctor.

now, i just watched the keys of marinus and quick recap: ian is sentenced to death for killing someone and stealing the key and is on trial to be proven innocent. the legal system of millennius is reversed, is such that one is "guilty until proven innocent". the doctor is ian's defendant. the doctor tricks the first culprit into confessing. then, he leads the tribunal to catching the accomplice red-handed by deducing where the key is in a locked-room-mystery-esque plot.

the precedent the doctor avails is not the precedent acceptable to the legal system he is participating in. this is made explicit when he sends their newfound friends altos and sabetha to go to the library of millennius and look for precedents for murder. their findings are of no use to him. or to us. what the doctor depends on is himself, his own trickery and wisdom and deductions. he notes keeping pyrrho in mind, the skeptic philosopher from around 300 BC earth. the doctor reaches for a precedent that is incongruous with the legal system he is bound within. this is because he is fundamentally an exile. he is not at home anywhere.

even in his trials on gallifrey, the doctor is presenting his precedents from elsewhere. usually from earth. in the war games, the second doctor is on trial for interference and he cites the necessity to fight evil with the power of the time lords. the precedent he draws is so out of left field that it is not even a defence. it is the very charge he is on trial for.

the more i think about it, the less suited the doctor seems to assume the role of a lawyer or a defendant anywhere. in the deadly assassin, the fourth doctor's way out of a trial is to claim a legal right to run for presidency. the exile's only recourse to safety is the safety afforded by the home, which is not, in fact, afforded to him. at the end of the episode, the doctor will have charges against him dropped BUT he must return to his exile. he must leave gallifrey again.

the sixth doctor's trial is so wound up in pasts and futures that the valeyard's charge draws from the future and the doctor simply invokes modality as his defence. his defence is not precedent. his defence is himself. his person. his word. he shall improve. time can be re-written. he will be more cautious in his future. he is not bound to a written future (or a fixed law) because he is a time traveller (and an exile). he charts his own course. the law he ascribes to is necessarily provisional.

what i'm saying is, putting the doctor on trial, placing him in a courtroom, calls into questions his pasts and futures, which are confusing and illuminate how disjointed they are with the legal system of anywhere. this doesn't leave him above the law. this leaves him with what edward said calls "the exile's detachment".

Exile is not, after all, a matter of choice: you are born into it, or it happens to you. But, provided that the exile refuses to sit on the sidelines nursing a wound, there are things to be learned: he or she must cultivate a scrupulous (not indulgent or sulky) subjectivity […] Borders and barriers, which enclose us within the safety of familiar territory, can also become prisons, and are often defended beyond reason or necessity. Exiles cross borders, break barriers of thought and experience. (edward said, "Reflections on Exile")