Why We Love The Doctor: Part I

In November, Doctor Who will celebrate its 50th anniversary. 

This is the first instalment of a series of me being an existental geek.

(For reference, I’ve so far only seen the Ninth and Tenth Doctors and the next episode I’m going to watch is “The Pandorica Opens”. I don’t like the Matt Smith portrayl that much yet, and David Tennant is, as they say, "My Doctor")

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The Doctor has three great enemies  the Daleks, of course, the Cybermen, and the one people leave out, himself. He is his own worst enemy.

A Dalek

Both the Daleks and the Cybermen have had their emotions removed.

The Daleks are a race bent on exterminating all things not Dalek. They’re little ugly one-eyed octopus looking things inside a robotic casing made of Dalekanium They are not impossible to escape—its just extremely very not likely. The creator of the Daleks took out their emotions to make them better fighters.  

A Cyberman

The Cybermen, on the other hand  are not alien. Sure, they were created in the alternate universe, but they are native, so to speak, to Earth. They are humans who have been “upgraded” by having their brains put into a metal suit and having emotions neutralized, because the man who created them found emotions to be too painful.

David Tennant as The Tenth Doctor

The Doctor’s most dangerous enemy is what attracts us to the show. Not only are we watching a man fight threats beyond our imaginations, we are watching a man fight himself. The Doctor is the last of his species. Although he is an alien (Gallifrey, in the constellation Kastaberous) he is exquisitely human. He looks like a human (or, as he puts it, humans look like Time Lords as Time Lords came first) As he puts it, being a Time Lord is “A sum of knowledge. A code. A shared history. A shared suffering” (The Doctor’s Daughter). Being a Time Lord was having a connection with your people that all humans long for. (People=members of the same species, relatively generic, human=Homo sapien) The Doctor had all of that, and he blames himself for its destruction in The Time War. He had it all, and now he has nothing at all. He grasps out for a companion all the time, knowing that they can stay with him forever, but he cannot stay with them forever: at the start of the most recent revival (2005), the Doctor is already 900 years old. No human can possibly live that long. He is truly and utterly alone in the world.