Doctor Who/Analysis: Difference between revisions

{{Analysis}}{{work}}

One of the key abilities of the Doctor, which has helped the show's longevity to a huge degree, is his ability to "regenerate." When faced with imminent death, he transforms into a basically different person, with an entirely new appearance and altered personality -- butpersonality—but the same memories as the previous incarnation. These moments, of which eight have actually been seen on screen so far (the Second and Eighth Doctors regenerated off-screen), are usually as big and dramatic as they sound.

The Doctor has been played by eleven different actors in the TV series to date. <ref>That sound you heard was all the hardcore ''Who''-fans going "Actually..." Some of the more knowledgeable ones can tell you which Doctors were played by more than one actor.</ref> That's them in the picture at the top of the main page.

Stands for ''Time And Relative Dimension In Space'' (but not {{smallcaps|[[Recycled in Space|In Space!]]}})<ref>or, alternatively, Time And Relative ''Dimensions'' In Space</ref> A combination [[Cool Ship]], [[Living Ship]], [[Sapient Ship]], [[Alleged Car|Alleged Ship]], [[Time Machine]] and [[Bigger on the Inside]] (the trope-namer for that last one), who as well as having [[Time Travel]] abilities and the power to traverse the universe, can do pretty much anything. In a subversion, while the TARDIS is a product of Time Lord über-tech, it was gradually revealed as old, obsolete, and barely functional. It's gotten worse since then--likethen—like the alien equivalent of a jalopy held together with duct tape--thoughtape—though it's still light years ahead of all other such technology currently known to exist. The [[Most Wonderful Sound|TARDIS dematerialisation noise]] is the distorted sound of a door key being scraped along the bass strings of a piano. This sound effect, dating back to the very first serial in the sixties, is still used as of today, and still gives millions an inevitable chill through their spines ''whenever'' they hear it.

It's [[Bigger on the Inside]] (to this day, nobody knows exactly ''how'' big other than "ridiculously huge") and has the exterior appearance (because the chameleon circuit broke in the first episode) of a [[wikipedia:Police box|police box]].<ref>The Doctor's tried to fix it [[Doctor Who/Recap/S18/E07 Logopolis|a couple]] [[Doctor Who/Recap/S22/E01 Attack of the Cybermen|of times]], but eventually gave up - the in-story reason being that he'd grown fond of the police box appearance</ref>. That appearance has become so iconic of the show that when the BBC trademarked the TARDIS in 1996, the British police took them to court over it and ''lost!''

The Doctor is rarely alone in his travels. For the purposes of [[Exposition]] and for [[Audience Surrogate|someone the audience can identify with]], he has had a large number of companions (''mostly'' non-romantic, though Fanfic disagrees). In the show's very early days, he just traveled with his granddaughter and two of her high school teachers--whoteachers—who, in the very first episode, he actually kidnapped in a [[He Knows Too Much]] scenario. The idea was that the companions would be the "point-of-view" characters for the audience at home, in contrast to the mysterious, anti-heroic Doctor. Even as the Doctor became more identifiable and less of a curmudgeon, the companion remains the human element to tie him down, especially post-revival. They also give him someone to talk to. In ''[[Doctor Who/Recap/S14/E03 The Deadly Assassin|The Deadly Assassin]]'', the lone serial without a companion (other than ''[[Doctor Who/Recap/S3/E02 Missiontothe Unknown|Mission to the Unknown]]'', which didn't feature the Doctor, and ''The Doctor The Widow And The Wardrobe'', which featured substitutes) the writers found it difficult to explain what he was thinking. In-universe, he claims that he's "[[Doctor Who/Recap/S31/E01 The Eleventh Hour|lonely]]", while others have [[Doctor Who/Recap/NS/S3/E09 The Family of Blood|surmised the same]] and that he "[[Doctor Who/Recap/2006 CS the Runaway Bride|needs someone to stop him]]" from making drastic and, sometimes, awful decisions to rectify situations.

Companions are predominantly human, [[Parent Service|young, female, and attractive]]. In the early episodes there would also be a companion who was young, male, and heroic. Sometimes they are humanoid aliens, or, famously, a robot dog. They have joined and left the TARDIS for various reasons. The Doctor reserves the right to kick a companion out of the TARDIS for bad behaviour (''The Long Game'' is the only episode in which he has done it so far), or to take on a new companion even over the objections of present companions. Classic Series companions tended to have few or no ties to their homes (and often lose such ties, like in ''The Evil of the Daleks''), and--anniversaryand—anniversary specials aside--didaside—did not cross paths with the Doctor after leaving the TARDIS.<ref>unless the companion in question is Sarah Jane Smith, who did indeed return in the RTD era episode "School Reunion" and was a mite ticked about being ignored for thirty years</ref>. [[Russell T. Davies|RTD era]] companions don't divide their lives as neatly: they continue to interact with their families while away with the Doctor, and with the Doctor before, after or between their travels with him. [[Steven Moffat|SM era]] companions are like the Classic Who companions.

Female companions are stereotyped in pop culture memory as [[Damsel in Distress|helpless]] [[Screaming Woman|screaming women]], and the males were stereotyped as [[Action Hero|Action Heroes]]es (and the show accused of sexism), but a number of the females have been [[Action Girl|surprisingly kickass]] (Sarah Jane, Leela), and some males have been quite accident-prone (Adric, Rory). They're not always female, either.

The Doctor detests Torchwood on general principle (the feeling is mutual--themutual—the Doctor is specifically named in Torchwood's charter as its first alien enemy known), though Captain Jack, former companion and leader of Torchwood 3 ,<ref>until ''[[Torchwood: Miracle Day]]'', when he takes command of a kind of resistance movement of the same name</ref>, has been doing his best to change the Doctor's mind. The Doctor's relations with UNIT are much more cordial--hecordial—he's even ''worked'' for UNIT, as a scientific advisor, for much of his third incarnation and occasionally since then--thoughthen—though he has little patience with its bureaucracy, established procedures, and chains of command, just as he did with his own people's.

First, a quick note: Classic Who tends to be referred to by ''serial'', not by episode. A serial is a multi-episode story. For most of the show's history--asidehistory—aside from a little experimentation with 45 minute episodes--episodesepisodes—episodes lasted 25 minutes (give or take a few minutes). From the early '70s onwards, serials were usually four episodes in length, with six or two episode serials here and there. During the McCoy years, when the series had its number of episodes halved, the production team instituted a mix of three episode and four episode serials. A few one-off epic serials lasting 8 (''The Invasion''), 10 (''The War Games''), 12 (''The Daleks Master Plan'') and even 14 (''Trial of a Time Lord'') episodes were also broadcast.

Those aspects of the show that would normally be set by the series creator--stylecreator—style, tone, mythology--aremythology—are largely the province of the executive producer, or ''showrunner'', who may or may not write episodes. Over its forty years, the show has seen several executive producers (producers in the old days), each of whom has left his or her mark for better or for worse. ''Every'' showrunner is, for ''some'' fan, [[Scapegoat Creator|the one]] who [[Ruined FOREVER|Ruined It Forever.]] Possibly even [[Verity Lambert]] and [[Sydney Newman]], who co-''created'' the show.

That said, of the most controversial discussions in fandom is whether ''Doctor Who'' is a (to quote a line from a newspaper article which used to explain the show's appeal on the blurbs of the [[Novelization|novelizationsnovelization]]s) "the children's own program [[Periphery Demographic|that adults adore]]", a "family show" or a "[[Darker and Edgier|dark and edgy]] show like ''[[Battlestar Galactica]]'' meets ''[[The X-Files]]'', at midnight in an unlit cellar! Constant death and misery! Pain! Lots of pain!" That ''Doctor Who'' can plausibly be described in ''all'' of these terms is a possible key to its long-term appeal. In the opinion of [[Steven Moffat]] it's fundamentally a children's programme that adults can appreciate; if an episode of ''Doctor Who'' isn't keeping kids entertained, it isn't doing its job properly. A large part of this disagreement is down to the fact that most American ''Who'' fans would have discovered the show as teens or adults, while many older Brits remember the show as a ubiquitous childhood favorite. An examination of broadcast schedules for the show around the world reveals the schism in its audience: in the UK, the show traditionally airs around the supper hour on Saturdays. In the US, Canada, and other countries the "classic" series is often shown late at night, and newer episodes often air in prime time, often at "late hours" such as 8 and 9 PM.

In [[The Sixties]] and [[The Seventies]], [[The BBC|BBC]] policy was to junk or overwrite the media of television programs that had already aired<ref>Yes, this was short-sighted, but give them a bit of a break--the tapes they used were ''very'' expensive, and they didn't view such ephemera as having lasting cultural value, and there was no such thing as a "home video" secondary market. In addition, union performance contracts of the day only allowed for so many broadcasts of a programme. </ref> The upshot is that, out of around 700 episodes filmed, 106 are lost, with William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton's eras being the most affected, though audio tapes of all missing episodes still exist from fans who made recordings of the show when it aired (the BBC has released most of these commercially on cassette and CD, and occasionally have also produced reconstructions of missing episodes for DVD using them). Every Jon Pertwee onwards episode still exists, though a number of them exist only in black and white even though they were filmed in colour. There are currently 106 episodes missing.

No discussion of the show is complete without mentioning its [[Theme Tune]], which has a number of variations (as do the logos and [[Title Sequence|Title Sequences]]s). The original 1963 version of the ''Doctor Who'' theme is a hallmark of pre-synthesizer electronic music and, when paired with the trippy feedback titles, looked forward to late-60s psychedelica. Ron Grainer composed the music, and Delia Derbyshire, working in the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, realized it by taping a variety of electronic tones and distorted instruments, and splicing the tapes together by hand over many hours. It was so popular that it was one of the [[Trope Codifier|Trope Codifiers]]s of early [[Electronic Music]].

It has to be remembered that, during its most successful periods, the show has had a ''huge'' UK level of popularity, well above stereotypical "cult TV" or SF genre audiences. Current audience figures are regularly about 7 to 8 million an episode (with about 10 million for Christmas specials), often putting it within the top twenty or even ten broadcasts of the week, equivalent in US terms to something like 40 million viewers based on proportion of the population- some episodes from the classic series have clocked more than that, with "City of Death" getting an average of 14.5 million, although [[ITV]] was suffering from a strike at the time, and there were only three channels back then. It is beaten consistently in the UK only by [[Talent Show|Talent Shows]]s and major sporting events (though "Journey's End" trounced Wimbledon), and often holds its own against [[Soap Opera|Soap Operas]]s (though this wasn't the case in the waning days of the classic series in the late 1980s when it was constantly beaten by [[Coronation Street]]). It is probably the only non Talent Show or Soap Opera to regularly have spoilers (accurate or not) appear in the [[British Newspapers|mass market tabloid press]].

The show, because of its heyday in the seventies and eighties, has resulted in children growing up and starting careers ''[[Promoted Fanboy|for the sole purpose of working on the show]]'': [[Russell T. Davies]] started his screenwriting career with a (failed) submission to the BBC; [[David Tennant]] has confessed that the show got him into acting; and [[Steven Moffat]] has joked that he applied to be the executive producer when he was seven. Other people on the show also work [[So My Kids Can Watch|so their kids can see their parents]] in something that's not inappropriate, such as [[John Simm]], known more for gritty dramas before taking the role of the Master.<ref>Try not to think too hard about the fact that the apparently 'family-appropriate' role is a ''genocidal psychopath''</ref>. Even if an actor wasn't a fan when he was a kid, it's almost certain their little kid will be.