I discovered Doctor Who when I was starting high school. Late Saturday nights on PBS stories were shown without breaks for hours and hours every week. I loved watching it and thinking about how incredibly strange and radical the ideas in the show were. Without internet, I also wondered how or why British TV shows were so long. Only later did I figure out it was episodic.
John Pertwee who was the third doctor (my favorite) once said in an interview that he thought the Doctor was a boring know-it-all cruising through space – or something like that – and decided he would add in some bits of dialogue to humanize the doctor, or well, make him seem a lot less like a intergalactic know it all and more like an adventurer. The current show with all its backstories, twists, and recurrent characters I think owes a bit of a debt to Pertwee’s idea here.
I think the difference between classic who and contemporary who tracks on the difference of public attitudes toward science and knowledge. Contemporary versions of the Doctor are a lot more certain and a lot more committed to a particular base of knowledge that companions can’t really access – although they can understand. In classic who, the Doctor would be as in the dark as his human companions however he had something they did not – a method of inquiry and a process of working through a moment or a situation to determine what he should do (or more often not do).
The 2005 reboot is a product of its time – here’s a guy who is an expert on the future, science, history, everything. This might not really be possible or even desirable among a time travelling scholar. Commitment to a certain mode of inquiry – the kind the 3rd and 4th doctors represented best – is not only more reasonable to imagine in relation to time travel, but could also be a very good model for us when we encounter the novel and inexplicable.
Recent episodes, since the end of the 10th doctor to today are all about the Doctor’s psychology and personal traumas. This resonates with our contemporary situation where trauma, personal experience, and known innner truth have taken the lead in public discourse, inquiry, politics, and the like. Instead of questions, the Doctor has answers. And those answers are only revealed in the last act. We, the audience are to marvel at the Doctor not stand beside them. We are to be impressed, not seeing how easy it would be to think, believe, and act like the Doctor.
It’s not possible to know all the history, science, and meaning of cultures across every point in space time. It’s also unreasonable to think personal trauma and feeings would be able to be mapped across culture and civilization through space and time. It’s not possible for us to do either on one planet with one creature (humans). It’s better to think of Doctor Who as a show about how we should encounter the strange and new – with a process of inquiry, interactivity, and uncertainty – rather than the idea that we know or have felt what others have.