“Never be cruel, never be cowardly. Hate is always foolish, and love is always wise. Always try to be nice, but never fail to be kind. Laugh hard. Run fast. Be kind. Doctor… I let you go.”
Thus says the Twelfth Doctor, moments before he regenerates. He’s leaving a legacy, a set of instructions, for the next Doctor. These are the things he finds most important. The things he wants, above all else, for his next incarnation to take to heart. (Hearts?) Kindness, laughter, love. These are the things the Doctor should have. This is what the Doctor should aspire to be. Never be cruel, never be cowardly.
And then the Thirteenth Doctor comes along and ignores it.
I think Series 11 was a great setup for this, if I’m going to be honest. I didn’t like Series 11 that much, because I thought it was boring, especially for character work. The Doctor is too bland, too cheerful, too boringly nice. There was nothing all that special about her character, nor her companions.
But now that we have Spyfall, and a great start to Series 12, I’m finding this setup of boring, nice, cheerful, optimistic, naive Doctor to be almost necessary. Perhaps we didn’t need a full season of it, but it makes great potential for character dynamics, especially now that Chibnall is clearly focusing on that a bit more.
Thirteen is ignoring her last incarnation, or, at the very least, only paying attention to a few parts. She’s always trying to be nice, for example. And no one can accuse her of being cowardly. But what about the kindness? What about never being cruel?
From the start, Thirteen has kept an odd distance between herself and her companions. As Yaz says at the end of Spyfall, “You know everything about us, and we know nothing about you.” She’s trying to take what her previous self has said to heart (hearts?) and is doing that by trying to completely start over. She takes them to places where no one has ever heard of the Doctor, where there are no monsters from her past or skeletons in her closet. She doesn’t tell them where she’s from, and rarely makes any reference to things in her past. Forget, “What is the Doctor’s name,” this is more, “The Doctor hasn’t even told us the name of the planet she’s from,” which is something her past selves have all been very open about.
I think Thirteen’s thought process here is that she has too much baggage. She’s done so many bad things, been responsible for some of the worst crimes in all of time and space. She’ll scare her companions off if she’s open about her past. It’ll clue them into the fact that she can make mistakes, big ones. That they can get hurt. She doesn’t fully trust her companions, but she expects them to trust her. When the Dalek shows up in Resolution, she uses manipulation tactics to get them to approve of her murdering the Dalek in cold blood, and almost murdering Ryan’s dad in the process.
This is all a great setup for the return of the Master. The Master will not hesitate to expose the Doctor’s dirty past to her companions, and he almost succeeds in doing so in part one, with Graham. He and the Doctor are more similar than the Doctor would ever admit, with both doing horrible things, manipulating people, committing genocide. The difference between the two is that the Master revels in this. He loves it. The Doctor hides behind excuses and makes every effort to be good.
The big thing here, though, is that Thirteen has a lot of hidden darkness. She’s been turning to manipulation and secrecy in order to keep up a facade of being the nice, good Doctor. All of her big confrontation scenes have been her and the villain, alone. In those scenes, she has goaded, taunted, and threatened. She isn’t kind.
That’s why I’m okay with the Paris confrontation in part two, despite the very very sketchy racial things in that scene. The Doctor is confronting her oldest nemesis. She’s cornered. She’s desperate. She doesn’t have anyone to impress. And she’s going to ignore the never be cruel. She’s going to ignore the never fail to be kind. She isn’t any better than the Master, and you could make the argument that she’s worse, because the Master at least is open about the fact that he does terrible things. The Doctor is cruel. She’s ignoring those aspirations, those promises. This is who Thirteen is, even if she’ll never let the fam see it.
The Doctor is losing her sense of self. She’s already been cruel, incredibly so. She’s stolen the Master’s TARDIS, forcing him to somehow escape the Nazis (and she’s also clued them in to the fact that he’s a poc, which was totally unnecessary. This isn’t just thwarting the Master, this is personal. This is revenge. This is cruel.) She’s wiped the memories of the two women who helped her, against their will. There is nothing kind about any of this.
And she’s already starting to be cowardly. She’s still hiding things from her companions, lying about Gallifrey to Yaz, refusing to open up to them. She’s afraid. And I very much want to see what will happen with a scared Doctor and suspicious companions.
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