Paul Gadzikowski

Here are cartoons from the fanfiction sketchbook website since last Friday. Arthur, King of Time and Space cartoons in a separate post. Cartoons may contain unmarked spoilers.

( Featuring characters and/or images from DOCTOR WHO, DC comics, STAR TREK and MERLIN. )

Thanks for reading.

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I think I've put a finger on, for me, the difference between twentieth-century and twenty-first-century Doctor Who, and it goes back to something I said most recently in a discussion of the Battlestar Galactica revival on another webforum.

People like Giles and Guinan aren't really characters. They're plot devices. They're the Merlin figures of their milieus, the infallible prophets sworn to the hero(in)es' causes whom the hero(in)es in turn trust utterly. Their dramatic purpose is to be infallible: they exist to feed the hero(in)es data that's correct ... even if it's so ambiguous as to be useless until clarification shows up just after the hero(in)es've already puzzled it out. Now, in order to get actors like Anthony Stewart Head or Alec Guiness to play them, you do have to pretend and write them as if they were characters, sometimes. But they aren't, really. And that's why the new BSG doesn't have one.

This is exactly what Tom Baker was talking about when he said that the part is "actor-proof". The Doctor is, or was until now, a plot device with a tv show named after him. Ian and Barbara, and to a lesser extent Susan, were the real characters at the start; the Doctor just outlasted them all by decades. Some companions have been full characters. Ace comes to mind. Grace too (if an unpopular one) - I think it was Kate Orman who observed that Grace is the Campbellian Thousand-Faced Hero of Season 1996. But on the whole twentieth-century Doctor Who was a bunch of plot devices running up and down corridors and across quarries. And that's what I loved about it, too, and not only I.

Today - reflecting the demands of the contemporary television drama viewer - the Doctor is a character. He doesn't get huffy about perceived insults to his intelligence any more (well, not just that), he gets huffy about perceived insults to his ability to relate to people. He's not just a plot device any more. Is it progress? I bet there are people who think not. I like it so far.