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[[Here I'm just gonna copy that final paragraph from the last part bc like I said, the thought process wasn't really intended to be broken up like this but I don't wanna make it longer writing a better transition]]
For all the more superficial similarities, for all the analysis on how the narrative structures of each serve to bolster the most interesting aspects of these characters where another might have compressed them or just neglected to turn them into something so striking and developed - actually, at the end of the day, the real reason Two & Jamie and Edwin & Charles resonate so strongly is because they are, ultimately, alone together (and always both at once) in a way that sets them apart from other characters in the same or even more visibly-similar fictional scenarios.
And of course that's so deeply related to the rules of their universes, and the very particular niche they each inhabit there, even though it seemed like none of that mattered too much at the start. Why should it have? They aren't royalty in some high-fantasy epic or major players in a hard-science fictional satire - for all the ways that they're ultimately revealed to be Different, unique, changed by their experiences or else just misfits and outsiders of a kind to begin with (and sometimes all of the above) - they are also very crucially just normal guys, who want most of all to be left alone to get on with their (after)lives - together. It's right that we meet them & grow accustomed to them first on their own terms - traveling randomly through time and space, or taking cases in London's supernatural community - before we learn about the Time Lords or the Afterlife's Lost & Found Department, and the degree to which their way of existing is so deeply condemned in-universe.
For Two & Jamie, the fullness of this realization comes rather late in the day, but - again, connected to the way television was made in their era - the reveal of the Time Lords & their strict non-interference policy was a direct by-product of and natural next-step for the Doctor's story as it had been taking shape throughout the 60s already, so I have no issues with retroactively taking it into consideration when viewing the Second Doctor's entire tenure. (For what it's worth, I think it's also significant that most people viewing 60s Who these days aren't picking it up at random either - it's safe to assume some familiarity with the modern show's premise, which includes a general sense of taboo surrounding the Time Lords & altering history to begin with - but I digress).
By the time Two shows up on the scene, we already know life on the Tardis is inherently transitory - it's a travel story, first and foremost, but it's also significant for having no set or even proposed end destination. Companions have been coming & going for years, and we've just learned that even the Doctor can fully reinvent himself, even if he won't literally disappear (looking at you, Celestial Toymaker). We know it's itinerant, and not meant to last. Still, in the form of Jamie joining in his second-ever story and remaining longer than any other companion ever had or will more than 50 years (& counting) later, we begin to see a really clear stability emerge from that setup - a change so constant, it becomes its own kind of permanence. Tardis life already has a certain liminal, not-quite-normal - even allowing for the scifi of it it all - quality to it, which these characters seem to be wrangling into the shape of a home against all odds, well before we meet the Time Lords.
Once we do, the rest slides into place straightforwardly enough: the image of the Doctor as a fugitive of this all-powerful but distant, cold, unfeeling culture. The fact that no one great event (a war had often been speculated, before) led to his flight, since all he cites to his companions & while on trial are disagreements over their fundamental philosophy of Not Getting Involved. And what could make more sense? If there's one thing we know about the Doctor - any Doctor, but certainly this Doctor - it's that he meddles. He gets involved, he gets attached to people, he brings them out of their assigned place in space and time, often willingly now, and has come to care about them and feel at home among them in a way that we're not surprised to hear is definitely not sanctioned by the world he comes from.
The change we've watched the character undergo since 1963 is much larger than the change between William Hartnell & Patrick Troughton. Instead, it's an arc both of them have been playing all along - the only sensible conclusion to reach, really, considering the shape of a show that opened with Ian & Barbara joining him: companions make us better people, change the way we look at the world, turn us into fuller versions of ourselves. Getting involved is messy - comes with all kinds of complications, ranging from keeping history on-track to watching out for all the tricky human emotions that come into play once people begin becoming important to one another - but at the end of the day, is also worth all the bother in the world.
Doctor Who the show has been so pro-getting-involved since the instant it started with two concerned but nosy schoolteachers poking around a junkyard - and the Second Doctor exemplifies this so well in his character, more madcap and undignified than his predecessor, flying by the seat of his pants a bit more, it's true, but also freer and happier with himself and his companions - of course the greatest threat to him, and the thing that both created him and sent him running, is a society where meddling is anathema, and permanently cut-off erasure (of the War Lord, of your own memories, of the person you are right now, even) is at once the most serious punishment they have, and the preferred method by which they set things "right."
It's large part of why The War Games feels like a deeply queer story, casting a queer light both backwards & forwards over the rest of the series, before we even go anywhere near considering if the two guys at its center, fighting to remain part of each other's lives in a world insistent there is no room for something as simple and harmless as that, would ever do anything we'd categorize as "actually" gay.
It's also why I think 6b is as attractive a concept as it has proven to be in the years since, as a subject for fanwork & official spinoff material alike. We've gotten more 'canon' stories detailing it in some pretty recent years, but even before that, the bones of the idea were clear enough, and it never just existed as a theory because anybody was really desperate to have more gaps in which to set potential Two & Jamie stories - including the one the show itself had given us in 1985 (Simon Guerrier took a shot at making that actually work within the confines of Season 5 in an audio drama in 2015; it did nothing to detract from the appeal of 6b, which is currently the setting of Big Finish's ongoing Second Doctor range). It's because putting a figure like Two - the misfit, outsider, sympathetic meddling 'cosmic hobo' - into conjunction with the Time Lords at their most all-powerful and controlling, is a recipe for a very particular kind of drama. Positioning him there with Jamie only adds to the layers in which they're both bound.
It's a way for this Doctor to be more in control of his travels than he ever was (we can't forget that the tv Tardis of the 60s was 100% unpredictable), but also to give him Serious Boundaries in a way he never had to deal with before, either. The two of them are freer, in some ways, and absolutely trapped in others. They're 'doing good' in the sense that, by definition, we know missions the Time Lords send them on would be carried out with or without their (ironically now state-approved) involvement, but with them & their hard-won more human approach, we can hope they'll be handled with a compassion and care that would otherwise be absent. It lends totally new aspects to their characters, simply having that kind of responsibility, that stamp officialness but lack of authority, new situations they can be forced to deal with - and yet it does so while just reiterating and reinforcing that central premise we loved about them before - two constants in a world of danger and adversity, making an impact and caring (about the worlds they visit, and about each other) under conditions they're really not supposed to be okay with. They are always generally presumed to be happy that they're together in this situation, because that must be one of the few bright sides to being stuck under the thumb of the people most dangerous to them, and likely why they submit to it in the first place.
Do I even need to type out the words "they should want to move on but don't, because they have each other" for it to become clear why this setup was what came to mind while watching the ghost boys struggle to carry out their business?
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