The Thirteen Doctors

This year has seen the introduction of two new incarnations of our favourite Time Lord. Although we still have a lot to learn about them both, we know that one, Peter Capaldi, will play the Doctor’s next regeneration. The other, John Hurt, will purportedly play a missing, previously secret incarnation – most likely the true Ninth Doctor.

This takes our total to thirteen, unlucky for some but a miraculous treat for fans. For the uninitiated, that’s eight classic series Doctors (Hartnell, Troughton, Pertwee, Baker, Davison, Baker, McCoy and McGann), and five modern era Doctors (Hurt, Eccleston, Tennant, Smith and Capaldi).

Much is made of how regeneration has kept the show fresh, but it has also kept it interesting because,  no matter how much the Doctor changes from one life to the next, he remains recognisably the same being. The past fifty years have shown us thirteen different facets of the same person, each one with their own quirks and with different personality traits brought to the fore. As a result, the Doctor’s psyche has been unveiled and explored perhaps more thoroughly than any other popular fictional character. 

What will Capaldi bring to the role? We probably all have different ideas and different hopes, although I’m seeing a lot of anticipation for a more authoritarian Doctor, a more paternal Doctor, a Doctor who is more mysterious and less trustworthy. The showrunner, Stephen Moffat, has used the following adjectives to describe the next Doctor: ‘fierce’, ‘tricky’, ‘different’ (to Matt Smith), and ‘brilliant’ and  It is easy to see the good things that Capaldi may bring to the role, and very hard to anticipate problems that may arise from him playing the part. But problems there will be, I am sure, as almost every new Doctor has a few teething troubles. I am equally sure that Capaldi can pull through these, so long as we accept them and don’t expect perfection. That would be a very easy mistake to make. Because Capaldi is such a talented and well-respected actor, it is tempting to put him on a pedestal and expect too much from him, which would set him up for a fall.

I have to admit, this is the opposite of my reaction to Matt Smith’s casting. I expected very little from him, as I didn’t think he was suitable for the part at first, for various reasons which I am ashamed to say I shouted about all over the internet and am too embarrassed to repeat. Needles to say, I eat my words. After the usual teething troubles, Matt won me over with his quite brilliantly eccentric interpretation of the character. He is not my ideal type of Doctor, but he is a very good one. With Capaldi, I am simply excited to see how he plays the part, and by the implications of his casting. He seems to have all the qualities of a truly great Doctor but what qualities are they exactly?

We have seen the Doctor as an ill-tempered meddler,  an eccentric wanderer, a scientist secret agent, a madcap friend, a compassionate hero, a volatile genius, a subtle trickster, an elegant gentleman, a cursed pariah, a battle-scarred survivor, a dashing and charming casanova , and a crazy young professor. What qualities define the Doctor? We could say that he is a man of peace, but we would have to dismiss the sometimes violent sixth Doctor, and the genocidal actions of the Time War. We could say he is an altruist but that would ignore the first Doctor’s often pathologically selfish actions. We could define the Doctor as an anti-authoritarian wanderer, except the third Doctor worked with the military forces of U.N.I.T. for many years. We could call him an intellectual, a man who solves problems with ideas not action, but many of the Doctors have been action heroes to some extent. We could say that he is a man of principals, who always lives according to his own rules (however alien they may be) but then what about John Hurt’s Doctor, who did what he did in the name of peace and sanity, but not in the name of the Doctor? 

The Doctor is a man who is indefinable, yet also has a clear identity. He is infinitely adaptable, and infinitely consistent. He is a hero and an antihero, a young man and an old man, a genius and a fool, an altruist and a pragmatist, a bohemian and a traditionalist, a thinker and an action hero, an asexual and a Lothario, a man of peace and a man of war, a planner and an improviser, an alien and a human, detached and empathetic. He is Time’s Champion, The Oncoming Storm, The Traveller from Beyond Time, The Last of the Time Lords, the Time Lord Triumphant, The Raggedy Man, The Professor and, of course, River Song’s ‘sweety’.

The Doctor has worn so many faces and personalities already, and soon we will have the fantastic opportunity to view another facet of this dark wanderer.