Doctor Who and Philosophy by Courtland Lewis & Paula Smithka

Author:Courtland Lewis & Paula Smithka [Lewis, Courtland & Smithka, Paula]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, Currently Reading, Doctor Who
ISBN: 9780812696882
Publisher: Open Court
Published: 2010-12-01T05:00:00+00:00

EPISODE 4

Human Beings, You’re Amazing. Apart from That, You’re Completely Mad

What the Doctor Teaches Us about Existence

19

Regeneration and Resurrection

MICHAEL HAND

There are certain losses in childhood that stay with you not only because of their aching sadness, but because, even in the throes of despair, you realize they have changed you, become part of you, in a mysterious way enriched and enlarged you. They stay with you because, as well as being the end of something wonderful, they are the beginning of something new and unknown and exhilarating, something whose fascination lies precisely in its contrast with what has gone before. Such is the end of your first romance, the day your family moves from the house you were born in, and the moment it dawns on you that there are problems in life your Mum and Dad can’t help you with. And such is the episode of Doctor Who in which your Doctor regenerates.

Everyone (by which I mean everyone with access to BBC television and a modicum of taste) has a Doctor they think of as theirs. Your Doctor is the one you hold to be the truest embodiment of the Doctor’s essence and, normally, the one who accompanied you through your formative years. As we learn in the mini-episode “Time Crash” (2007), even the Doctor himself, in one of his later incarnations, thinks of an earlier incarnation as his Doctor. The Tenth Doctor looks back on the Fifth as the point at which he stopped trying to be “old and grumpy and important” and acquired the traits he now thinks of as most centrally his own.

My Doctor is the Fourth, the Doctor of jelly babies and yoyos and impossibly long scarves. All the Doctor’s incarnations have possessed an incorruptible decency and respect for the value of life (notwithstanding momentary aberrations on the parts of the First and Sixth), but in the Fourth Doctor, as portrayed by the magnificent Tom Baker, these qualities are allied with a charm, confidence, and mischievousness unmatched by his predecessors or successors. (the Doctor’s multiple incarnations, of course, overlap roughly but not exactly with portrayals of the character by different actors: not exactly because the First Doctor has been portrayed by at least two actors, and three if you count Peter Cushing in Dr. Who and the Daleks (1965) and Daleks—Invasion Earth 2150AD (1966), which you shouldn’t for several reasons, chief among which is his utterance of the abomination: “Hello, I’m Dr. Who.”) The Fourth Doctor saw me through the tricky transitional years from toddler to preteen and represented to me everything in life that seemed worth emulating and aspiring to.

So when, in the final scene of the final episode of “Logopolis” (1981), the Fourth Doctor plunges from the scaffold of the Pharos Project satellite dish, merges with the Watcher and regenerates into the Fifth, my sense of loss was palpable and overwhelming. I suffered, I think, an embryonic form of bereavement. But there was, too, an undeniable thrill of anticipation, an awareness that a

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