Well. That… certainly broke the template. There always was the potential to do something like this with the schow, and in forty-some years they never did. This is kind of like a revelation.
So this is what you can do with a time travel story.
It’s like… a Treasure game, the way it’s using the series concept. It’s like this is what the show’s format has been meant for all along, and it just hasn’t happened until now.
I like also how all the writers seem to be fighting to inject new, random bits of continuity and “mythology”. Christmas, you get the hand. Here, you get the Doctor turning his “mind meld” powers on a human. Then you get all the business about “Doctor” just being a title, like “Madame de Pompadour”, and it hiding something dark and secret.
We’ve been getting the “Doctor Who?” jokes since last March, and all through the new series the Doctor keeps dodging the question of who he is. This is the first time some real importance has been tied to the question, though. That the audience has been given the cue: “That’s a good point. Who is he, anyway? What’s his deal?” It all goes back to the beginning. One of the big, important unresolved issues that kind of got forgotten after 1969 or so.
Curious thing is, all through the ’80s and ’90s there was an attempt to bring the question back up again. John Nathan-Turner, the producer during the ’80s, addressed it by putting question marks all over the Doctor’s clothes. (“‘Doctor WHO’ — get it?!”) Then Andrew Cartmel, the script editor during the final couple of seasons, had this plan for suggesting that all we knew was wrong, and that the Doctor was way more than we’d ever imagined. That plan ended when the show ended, though the novels and stuff all through the ’90s took it in some seriously strange directions.
This isn’t clothes-deep, though. And it isn’t attempting to rewrite history. It’s just bringing attention back to the realization that we really don’t know who this guy is, outside of what we’ve witnessed. We don’t know what’s driving him or why. Though it seems we know a lot, it’s all just details. He’s a Time Lord. He’s been wandering for nine hundred years, basically on his own, separated from his own kind. Somewhere over the last couple hundred years, all the other Time Lords died out. Though to an extent it doesn’t make that much of a difference, as he was always alone anyway. At first he was hiding from his own kind; now he’s just… used to hiding. He even hides that he is hiding, with all of his adventures and attempts to do right by throwing himself in without a thought of caution, and the parade of assistants he’s enlisted. Then he always just moves on. Never bothers tidying up. Goes back into hiding, in his little box, outside the universe.
* * *
I think the best line — well, exchange — in this was between the Doctor and MdP:
“This is my lover, the King of France.”
“Yeah? Well, I’m the Lord of Time — and I’m here to fix the clock.”
Somehow, framing the story so you can also see him as sort of a fairy tale character from Madame de Pompadour’s perspective, and so you can see the weird logistics that fall into space then — well. Cripes.
I mean, it makes sense. For her and everyone there, he’s like a sprite or gnome, who keeps popping in and out of the world. And it just so happens that he’s the lord of time. So of course he’d be there to repair the clock. And of course the menace would be made of clockwork. That’s the only way it would make sense, his being there. And of course the only time he does appear is when the clockwork droids do — when the clock needs fixing. And of course they’re no real menace, because he’ll always be there, like the tooth fairy.
Somehow all that business is solidified in one brief exchange. He becomes a myth. A small, personal myth.
And in a sense, he’s not much more to us — even though he’s (effectively) been there through our whole lives. Forty-three years, actually. (Hmm.) On a practical level, he’s no less a mystery.