Why The Doctor And The Sound Of The TARDIS Bring Us Hope (Part 2)

By Anna Brailow on July 25, 2016

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In the year 1966, the Doctor did not die; he regenerated into a new body and slightly new personality. His character development is slow and sure. He is constantly growing and developing. He makes new friends and travels with them, just as he did with Susan, Ian and Barbara.

Please read Part One before continuing.

Played by Patrick Troughton, the second doctor is described by the BBC as having “a more playful, whimsical air [that] disguised dark undercurrents and a sharp mind.”

The man behind the magic, Patrick himself, was very private and guarded. However, a biography of his life was penned by one of his six children, Michael Troughton.

IMDB gives some of the bare bones basics.

“Patrick Troughton was born in Mill Hill, London and was educated at Mill Hill School. He trained as an actor at the Embassy School of Acting in the UK and Leighton Rollin’s Studio for Actors at Long Island, New York in the USA.”

What the actor didn’t talk about as much, for understandable reasons, are his times as a navy lieutenant in World War II. Again for emphasis: understandable reasons.

Troughton, after the war, became a Shakespearean actor. In fact, he starred in two Laurence Olivier films. See him here in Richard III. For those who have studied theatre and acting methods, he used the Stanislavsky method which he learned in the U.S. and (at the time) was seen as radical in the UK. This method, developed unintentionally through pedagogy by one Konstantin Stanislavsky, revolves around the idea that an actor should use their emotional memories and past experiences to portray their character.

The second doctor’s companions in the episode that I am focusing on are Victoria and Jamie. Jamie McCrimmon, played by Frazier Hines, is the first companion to be treated as The Doctor’s equal in a sense. His character is that of a highland warrior from 1746 who established such a familial bond (from Doctor to Companion and actor to actor) with The Doctor that he appeared in 116 episodes in total.

BBC’s Fraser McAlpine writes: “For all that the Doctor is super-intelligent and a Time Lord and all that, he needs a Jacobean hard-nut standing behind him, ready to rip some heads off at a moment’s notice.”

Victoria Waterfield, played by Deborah Watling, is from 1866 and is the daughter of an inventor who was allegedly building a steam powered time machine and perished at the hands of one of The Doctor’s oldest enemies, the Daleks. While they aren’t in the episode I will be highlighting here, they do play an integral role in The Doctor’s timeline as a species of alien from the planet Skaro whose goal is to take over and destroy everything that isn’t “Dalek.” Victoria is definitely more emotional than Jamie, but she is strong willed, stubborn and sensible.

A very applicable underrated episode entitled The Enemy of the World features The Doctor, Jamie, and Victoria in an encounter with a ferocious politician named Salamander who creates natural disasters and panic in order to create a need for the voting public. Salamander creates those disasters by enslaving a group of people who he leads to believe that the world is perpetually in the aftermath of war and filled with radiation.

Those people operate machinery that create targeted natural disasters. The ace up the sleeve of those rebelling against Salamander is that The Doctor looks an awful lot like him. What makes this episode so interesting is that it delves a great deal into the ideology of The Doctor and his character development up to this point.

In the beginning of the episode, The Doctor is mistaken for Salamander by a group of people who mean to kill him. The Doctor comments throughout the episode about members of humankind who would jump to murder or destruction for personal or perhaps societal gain. We begin to see one recurring theme within the Doctor Who ideology here which we will continue to explore more of as we go on.

Doctor Who is not what The Doctor is called. Doctor Who is exactly what it sounds like, a question. According to a later episode, it is the oldest question in the universe. And, in this universe, it is. The Doctor is well-versed in many subjects, especially those involving science and history, but he’s not a doctor in the traditional sense of the word.

Rather, he’s a being who seeks to embody the name in whatever way he can. He tries his best to do what is good and just and right, but despite having such a strong mind and heightened capabilities, he still has his limits as any human would.

The Doctor may not be human, as I have said before, but that does not mean that it is any less offensive to objectify him. His character is foreign to humanity, but not less.

Back in the synopsis of this episode, I detailed what exactly Salamander was doing to take political control. He made people believe in an influx of natural disasters, and fear and paranoia made them weaker as a society. This, friends, is food for thought.

Something interesting about the way The Doctor works as a protagonist is that he’s not quick to characterize someone as evil. Indeed, he wishes to right an injustice and combat an ideology. It is that, not the person inherently, that is evil.

Here is a well-placed phrase that is always a good reminder to have every so often.

Once in a while, the chosen villain of an episode just happens to be more intelligent than the audience wants him to be. To elaborate, an unintelligent antagonist offers a certain amount of humor and could be easily beaten, but this one elicits more concern mainly because he is very smart and very powerful and he knows how to manipulate words and ideas and project them onto his followers.

Despite his efforts, The Doctor never seems to be able to blend in with his surroundings. While this can be extremely annoying to him, he does accept it. So, he makes it his own personal running joke.

Again, food for thought. Put yourself in someone else’s shoes.

Go back to what I said earlier about the state of being evil. Is it the person that is evil or the ideology that he possesses? The Doctor sees an unethical unjust ideology, but he does not want to kill the person who has it and is acting on it. He would, however, expose him and ruin him or have him arrested. In other words, he would make this person unable to perform evil acts.

This is important. This is applicable.

What ends up tipping The Doctor off ties back to what he said in the beginning about human kind wanting to destroy each other, and the fact that they are so willing to be the judge and executioner of others. This episode is powerful and important and underrated, and the messages within are key to interpreting current events. Keep them in mind.

People are people and objects are objects — do not confuse the two. You are human, an extraordinary complex being in a world of other extraordinary complex beings. They may think or feel something that you do not, but that does not mean that you have the right to be their ultimate judge.

May I thank this incredible piece of media for relaying these important messages that need and deserve to be heard, and may I thank Patrick Troughton and his family for all the care and passion and devotion they put into the marvelous years when he was The Doctor.

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