"Do I have the right?"

[scarfman]

The very first segment I ever saw of Doctor Who was in March 1981 on WTTW, PBS in Chicago. WTTW aired Doctor Who in "feature format", editing half-hour episodes together into whole serials, but breaking serials of six or more episodes into two parts so that no part lasted longer than ninety minutes (The War Games aired in three parts). My first Doctor Who was the second half of Genesis of the Daleks.

The climax of that serial - as opposed to of any of the individual episodes - is when the Doctor has in his hands two wires whose contact will destroy the natal lab of the race of the Daleks, the scourge of history and the universe, the monsters whose emnity first transported Doctor Who into television ratings history. He stops and ask his traveling companions, "Do I have the right?"

Why?

Seriously, why? In all the other instances on Doctor Who when the protagonist commits genocide in self-defense of himself, his companions, people he doesn't know, whole planets, whole species, or the whole universe, never at any other time has he ever hesitated.

If you're thinking of The Parting of the Ways, don't. It's not an example of this because the Doctor's hesitation on the Game Station isn't on account of the genocide of the Daleks but on account of the billions of innocents on Earth. The Doctor always capitulates to enemies' threats of hostage death. In recapturing that element of himself on the Game Station³, he healed himself; yet doomed himself to regenerating a new personality, for with that healing the time of Post Traumatic Stress Doctor was done.

Yet, in the laboratory on Skaro he hesitates, wondering whether he has the right. Then, later in Resurrection of the Daleks, it comes out that he regrets that hesitation so much that he resolves to commit cold-blooded murder of the Daleks' creator Davros in restitution to the universe. But cold-blooded murder is too far outside his character, and he is dissuaded by the most transparent promises of reform from someone of whom he ought to know better.

(The Doctor's fifth personality was never quite right anyway - except for those few minutes in the Zero Room at the start - or he'd never have hatched the plot in the first place.¹)

So, why?

Because the Time Lords have ordered him to do it. He hates being their "errand boy" and he hates their self-serving dispassion, and despite himself he can't be certain, as he holds those two wires, whether the desire to wipe the Daleks from history is his own will or his resented masters'.

And consequently all the Doctor's subsequent dealings with the Daleks - and probably with the Time Lords, too - are colored by his resentment of the ambiguity in the Doctor's mind at the moment he held those wires. He can't wipe out billions of innocent humans from the Game Station in order to commit genocide against the Daleks, yet earlier in the Time War he wipes out billions (presumably) of innocent Time Lords² in the same object. Yes, it was a war of race/species proportion, and no doubt the Time Lords as a society were committed to it while the humans on Earth in A.D. 200,100 were manipulated victims. But is it really coincidence that, in wiping out the Daleks in the Time War, the Doctor wipes out the people who created the terrible ambiguity which kept him from doing it the first time he had the chance?

Hopefully the healing on the Game Station will have finally shut the door to what the Time Lords did to the Doctor's psyche when they sent him into the prehistory of the Daleks. Of course that doesn't mean he hasn't other problems.

¹ That is a clinical observation. Please don't mistake it for a critical opinion of the character or of the actor's performance in it.

² And/or Gallifreyans, if you subscribe to the class stratification school of thought on Time Lord society.

³ Edit Especially after having blown it a few episodes earlier in Utah.

Comments

[scarfman]

This essay was crossposted to doctorwho, where one of the comments brought up the issue of the probable substantial changes to the universe's history should the Doctor have succeeded in Genesis in his mission to unhappen the Daleks. I responded:

I meant to touch on that and forgot. I doubt the Time Lords sending the Doctor to Skaro would have destroyed the universe without the Time Lords realizing beforehand and therefore electing not to. I could be wrong (I mean, maybe either they didn't realize or they realized and decided to risk it), but in any case it didn't work. When the Doctor tells Barbara, "You can't rewrite history, not one jot!" [in The Aztecs], it suggests that the universe looks after itself to a large degree, and pehaps that's why events contrived it so the Doctor couldn't blow up the lab.

Perhaps the Time War was what the forecast in Genesis had predicted, and the Doctor was sent in hopes that the Time War would be averted. I suspect the Daleks and the Time Lords balance each other holistically in history (in late Cold War era Doctor Who they were quite portrayed as the two temporal superpowers in the spacetime continuum), and you can't get rid of one without getting rid of the other. Of course, neither is quite got rid of [now, after the Time War], but a balance remains: the Doctor cancels out what the remaining Daleks do.

[ed-fortune.livejournal.com]

Father's Day and The Five Doctors implies that the Time Lords can fix cracks caused by meddling with history. The First Doctor can't do that sort of thing because it'll draw the attention of the Time Lords (which happens in War Games).

This implies that the Time Lords where perfectly willing to pave over any cracks created by The Doctors actions, though he may have had to then of spent his eternity creating the peace that the Dalek's caused through their marauding.

[scarfman]

My inference is rather that the Time Lords had automatic preventative maintenance mechanisms in place that would safeguard against the effects of such anatemporal actions as the Doctor occasionally took, or even as the War Lords (The War Games) took. Note that the Time Lords didn't know what the War Lords were doing till the Doctor notified them. This wouldn't have been the case if the safeguards of which the Doctor speaks in Father's Day required conscious intervention by Time Lords. And the Doctor was speaking of only those minor rifts as his single TARDIS might cause (minor if they were tended to properly, as they were not in Father's Day), rather than the largescale anatemporal operation that the War Chief had mounted. Unless, like Robert Holmes, you want to argue that the Time Lords are corrupt, two-faced and manipulative enough that they would stand by letting the War Lords get away with their plot, in aid of getting the Doctor to turn himself in once he stumbled on it (which, Holmes would argue, the Doctor was sure to do eventually because the Time Lords were really controlling the TARDIS all along anyway).

[larksilver.livejournal.com]

Hmm.. Interesting essay. I'm afraid I've not seen the episodes in question from the Time War and can't speak to the Doctor's motives, etc. I was aware of the cogent bits, so no spoilers 'ere, no worry!


But I *liked* Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Doctor (he runs neck-and-neck with (ohgoodnesshisnameescapesme) the one with the scarf, curly hair, and bad teeth as my favorite Doctor), and I'm going to have a very very hard time dealing with Barty Crouch in his shoes. /sigh.

[vindaloo-vixen.livejournal.com]

I only just thought about these differences, and maybe it's that he doesn't feel he has the right to wipe out the Daleks before they've done anything, regardless of what he knows about the future. That's why when he has his little talk to Sarah Jane, he refers to a child who will grow up evil, rather than someone who's already an evil adult (or evil child, I guess).

[scarfman]

Yes, there is that difference too between the incident in Genesis and the incident in Parting. Though it could be argued that the Doctor only dredges the issue up in Genesis as a subconscious excuse to manifest but mask his own ambivalence toward having been sent to do this by the Time Lords. If the Doctor makes that argument to himself, out of need to make the situations seem more similar ... well, that just complicates things all the more dunnit?