scarfman | "Do I have the right?" (Reply)

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.