thinking about the fourth doctor (again) (it happens often). often labelled as one of the most alien incarnations of the doctor - especially in contrast to his successor, the fifth doctor - and yet i just don't see it. or rather, i do, but i think i'm disagreeing with the wrong thing. the doctor is alien. and certainly, across the fourth doctor's tenure, he spends his time as anything from errand boy to president for his home planet. he's very aware of his status as a perpetual outsider; he remarks as much to sarah, sulking. but sarah is the clue here. the doctor is an anglophile, a post-imperial successor to the victorian inventor. when he travels with humans - contemporary humans, that is, harry and sarah - he is held at a distance from humanity, but clearly partakes in their culture: homo sapiens, he asserts, indomitable. this is clearly not the proclamation of someone who is human, but it is also clearly not the proclamation of someone who doesn't give a shit about humanity. he exists outside of human culture - but he conforms to its eccentricities; that is, he locates himself on the peripheries of english culture by the very act of adopting english eccentricities. would you like a jelly baby? he's a bohemian - strange, but strange by the standards of humans. he sticks out like a sore thumb on gallifrey. there is a stark shift across his tenure from earth to the rest of the universe - first the doctor ditches unit in robot, then he ditches contemporary earth in the hand of fear, then he ditches humanity full stop in the invasion of time, then he even ditches our universe in full circle. and yet at the end of it all he comes back, to die in england in the presence of contemporary humans. the doctor's humanity - the spirit of humanity, not the literal species - is arguably ever more present the longer he spends with Literally Anyone Other Than Sarah. he's the teaboo who explains leela's own heritage to her when they land in england - more often than not in the victorian era, as it happens. he's that freak who's obsessed with irrelevant humans to romana, who is completely detached from humanity-slash-emotion and argues for what we might now recognise as ai art (computer logic) in city of death, whilst the doctor angrily insists on the importance of earth culture and human, indistinguishable here from non-machine, sentient, artistic touch. he coaches adric through the typical idioms and customs of twentieth-century. ironically, the longer the doctor spends with the obviously non-human - with romana, who is handily from the same cultural background, or k9, a literal robot - the more the doctor's humanity becomes evident. in a sense he drags romana down with him - he attempts to instil in her a sense of humanity, varying from desperately trying to go on holiday to literally taking her to cambridge university. and to some extent, it works! but the doctor will always be the more human one. contrasted with harry and sarah, he naturally appears more distant, more alien - they are recognisable as pov characters, similar to us. but contrasted as he is with the cold logic of k9, the distance in time of leela, or the alien worldview of romana, and the doctor becomes the torchbearer for us, the human audience. the doctor becomes the one who is overly familiar with english culture. the doctor becomes the one who edits shakespeare and advises da vinci, or maybe it was the other way round. when he quotes shakespeare to sarah, it's an irritating distraction because she knows what he's talking about and wishes he would stop trying to get them killed. when he quotes shakespeare to romana, it's a baffling irrelevance with no meaning or weight to her. the doctor is no longer an alien burdened by his exile on a planet he doesn't even like all that much; the doctor is an ambassador for humanity, an inheritor of its literary allusions. he defends the spirit of humanity, joie de vivre, imagination, passion and love. he is not physically human - but he is its byronic hero. maybe next time he'll even play cricket.
blakekathryn
stormborns
kianamaiart
2087
germansingergirl
