scarfman | Human is as human does, ma'am (Reply)

I had occasion to post a portion of this stock essay of mine in an LJ comment today, which made me realize I've never posted it here before.

The "Not everything Doctor Who characters say is true" continuity patch is useful in debunking one or two contradictions in an otherwise unambiguous set of data. But if you go applying it arbitrarily to anything you just don't like, you might as well apply it to everything and admit that it's all fiction anyway. Not that it isn't, but there you are.

It's one thing to apply it to, e.g., the Doctor's single mention of TARDIS isomorphism in Pyramids of Mars, when there are many examples of other people successfully operating the TARDIS.

It's another to apply it instance-by-instance to every occurrence of the phrase half-human in Season 1996: "He was wrong there." "He was lying here." "He was joking that time." "It's part of a scam." "It's just a coincidence that they both say it." "Now this contradicts something the examining physician said in Episode 2 of Enemy of the Wheel in 1967." "I looked in the almanac and the moon wasn't full that night." ...

Whether the Doctor's physiology is part human is an ambiguous question - he doesn't seem to have grown a second heart until Spearhead from Space, and seemed to be otherwise indistinguishable from human to a physician on at least one occasion before then (Moonbase I think Wheel in Space according to a comment below) and to Ian Chesterton taking his pulse (whereas when Turlough took his pulse Tegan had to explain).

The "Not everything" school in this case answers no old questions while uselessly generating new ones. The new questions generated by denying the Doctor to be half human can only retcon; as in, "Then why did he say it? Then why did the Master also say it? Then what about the retina and Eye of Harmony things?"

The reason accepting the Doctor to be half human is smarter is that it generates new questions that point to whole new stories; for starters, "How the hell could a Time Lord and an Earthwoman happen to have a baby?"

And as for the complaint, "The Americans had to have a half-human Doctor because of the Spock precedent": that strikes me as gross ignorance ("gross" as in "substantial" and "gross" as in "icky"). Contemporary folklore heroes have always been part-human. Hercules was half-human. Gilgamesh was 1/3-human (now there's a neat trick). Merlin was half-human. Merlin! Matt Jacobs didn't make the Doctor half-human, Ben Aaronovitch did.

crossposted to doctorwho