#genocide warning

In classic Who, while the Doctor often failed to save people, failed to stop the humans he associated with from committing mass murder, sometimes resorted to killing individual attackers in self-defense or to save others, and frequently employed the “hoist by their own petard” gambit to trick villains into doing themselves in if/when they tried to do others in, I couldn’t remember a case where he deliberately wiped out “an entire race.” 

That was always a bridge too far for the classic Doctors, something that is very much a thing that nuWho, and to some extent the EU, have introduced to the character.

So I looked it up. And found the thing I’d blotted out. And I’m once again reminded why I like so many fans back in the 80s felt that my beloved show had gone off the rails after Colin Baker became the Doctor.

It certainly wasn’t Colin’s fault; he was doing a stellar job with what he was given. But I remember our collective horror from Twin Dilemma onwards, culminating in the trial and Terror of the Vervoids where he did, supposedly, kill off an entire race (along with a bunch of other wildly out of character things whose reality was somewhat unclear. Like, was Peri’s death real, an alternate timeline, or fake? Were the stories presented by the Valeyard true, or fabrications he wanted to pass off as truth? That was a very confusing year). 

But it seemed like his killing of the Vervoids might have been “what really happened.” And that was a bold and questionable act to put upon the character, much like having the Doctor strangle Peri and then have her stay with the person who’d physically assaulted her (it was originally a kid’s show, remember, and it was still watched mostly by teens and young people). 

Yes, the Doctor was a flawed character. Yes, he was inconsistent, in an all-too-human way, eschewing violence one serial and resorting to it the next. But the classic Doctor’s character traits were like common law, building up a composite picture over decades. There were tendencies. And there were boundaries he had never crossed, or at least fought tooth and nail not to cross.

Twenty-plus years in, it felt fake and hollow to introduce new, out-of-character “crimes” simply in order to play the “your hero isn’t a hero after all” card and put him on trial for it.

It’s something that modern media does often for shock value. Reboots can’t leave heroic and decent characters alone; they must be given flaws that violate the earlier conceptions of them, as if we’re just too cynical to believe in someone who really and truly has an ethical center. The final years of classic Who were difficult on fans for many reasons, but this was one that distressed me the most. 

So of course. The Sixth Doctor had to have a story retconning that powerful defining moment in Genesis of the Daleks that all of us remember, when the Doctor couldn’t even bring himself to destroy a race of artificial life forms designed to be the perfect purveyors of galactic genocide, because he asked himself “Have I the right?” and said no, he couldn’t do it. Even to save countless lives, it was a bridge too far.

And then, in season 23, the scriptwriters wanted to have the Doctor doing all the things he’d never done in the previous two decades, apparently because they’d run out of ways to do Doctor Who other than to violate it.

I’m still not over it. Really I’m not.

It doesn’t bother me as much in nuWho. It’s a full reboot. And it treats that change-of-character with the weight it deserves. Rather than simply doing it for shock value, RTD posed the question, “what, if anything, would drive the Doctor to violate his ethics and do what he’d fought all his lives to avoid doing?” I felt like the Time War was a sufficiently humongous, awful, no-win situation with sufficient gravitas that one could almost believe it. 

It was still a bold and questionable move, one that I personally had a hard time accepting. It’s one of the biggest reasons the new show didn’t grab me, despite my liking Eccleston (and now Capaldi has finally drawn me in). But narratively, I could see it. I could see the new show was treating it as problematic, and that the Doctor was treating it as problematic, and he was haunted by it. (I like the additional retconning that he dropped the name of “Doctor” when he was no longer behaving like the Doctor). 

I still object to having it retroactively imposed on classic Who. And yes, I know, season 23 was part of classic Who, but just like the debates of some fans today, I felt it was the wrong direction to be taking the show back then. After five Doctors and 20 years, that was “new Who,” not “classic Who,” when we were watching it. It had to earn the right to change the show that much by tackling it responsibly and giving us good stories. And...  for the most part, it didn’t. Big Finish has, maybe? But it didn’t. The stories just weren’t good enough.

Give me my flawed Doctor. My arrogant Doctor. My inconsistent Doctor. My Doctor who screws up and makes the wrong decisions and is callous or insensitive or just plain naive at times. Yes, give me the Doctor who will kill off a Fendahl or a Dalek or even a squad of Silurians if he must in order to thwart their plan to kill off millions.

But don’t take away the man who will ask, “Do I have the right?” Don’t ever take away “There should have been another way.” Don’t take away the man who looks for alternate means to stop villains that don’t involve punching or fighting or killing, when he can avoid it.