Jay DeVoy is an attorney focusing on First Amendment issues and regular contributor to the award-winning law blog The Legal Satyricon.
I remember when I was very young and my father introduced me to Dr. Who. My first recollections of watching the show begin around 3 or 4 years old, but I’m sure he exposed me to it before then. This was in the days before cable was widely available, and I hadn’t learned the value of harmless escapism. Two decades later, having entered my father’s profession, and watching hardly any television or movies in my free time, I still watch Dr. Who to relax. And with Steven Moffat running the show for the last two years, I often feel like a child, as an impossibly complex and dramatic sequence is resolved in an obvious-though-seemingly-impossible conclusion.
For those unfamiliar with the show, The Doctor (his name is unknown, thus the semi-eponymous title “Dr. Who”) does not die, but instead regenerates any time he is critically injured. This allows the franchise to continue beyond any one actor, and the character to evolve, as different facets of the Doctor character are explored with each one of its iterations. To date, the Doctor has been depicted by 11 actors, the latest and current one of which is Matt Smith (the “11th Doctor”).
The 11th Doctor. Promotional image courtesy BBC; all rights reserved to same.
The Doctor is a classic hero, one who comforts the afflicted – saving them from situational and often intra-dimensional harms – and fights against classical enemies representing oppression and evil. In one episode, the Doctor will travel through space and time to help a young boy overcome his fear of his wardrobe closet – which, of course, has an extraterrestrial twist that endangers everyone else on the show. Over longer arcs, the Doctor will fight Daleks and the Cybermen, competing robot factions seeking to eliminate and convert all life forms in the universe, respectively. Still other threats that the Doctor fights, such as religious fanaticism that aims to kill the Doctor himself so that he cannot challenge the sect’s dominance over space and time, represent the Doctor character’s equity and pursuit of the common good.
The Doctor’s positive traits are innumerable but subtle. He is skilled with technology and navigation. While a bit awkward and bumbling – due more to the professorial nature the character has assumed under Smith’s tenure – the Doctor is not an oaf and is not depicted as a dull white male, nor is his physique unnaturally exaggerated like most protagonists’. The Doctor is loyal to his companions and allies, though strategic enough to know when debts must be called in, and prudent in placing his friends out of harm’s way when necessary. Most importantly, the Doctor is fallible. He errs. He fails to protect them close to himself, and he appropriately feels remorse – but does not let it consume him or derail him from his tremendous duties to save humanity.
This is in stark comparison to… Are there comparable shows on television these days? Are there similar movie protagonists. Even the fictional characters who ultimately do the right thing in American popular culture, such as Homer Simpson and Hank Hill, are besieged with inherent flaws. Homer is cavalier in his stupidity and, while entertaining, is demoralizing to males. Hank Hill is less flawed, but the victim of naivete most men – and most people – wish they could embrace. Hank is an optimist who believes in the system, and that public officials a) care, and b) are there to serve the public good. While small components in the pastiche of Hank’s character, they are flaws that anyone who has lived in the last 40 years, and especially men – men who have suffered through divorce, the loss of their children, and ruinous alimony and child support payments that were used for anything but their intended purposes – cannot believe.
What makes the Doctor particularly surprising, though, is that he is a product of the BBC. Granted, the Doctor is a holdover from his creation in the early 1960′s, and his consistent portrayal as a white male likely owes more to the British regard for tradition and institutions than the prevailing political beliefs of the show’s writers. (See also, the royal family.) Still, in a country that all but antagonizes men – particularly fathers victimized by divorce – and blames them for all stripes of social ills (while rabidly defending culpable women), it is impressive to see that a positive role model can emerge in a position so prominent in Britain’s pop culture and national psyche. Even if he is an anachronism, we are desperately in need for more role models like the Doctor.
