Who is my Doctor?

Posted on by

We Whovians seem to enjoy spending unnecessary amounts of time discussing the most unimportant and subjective topics in our favourite show’s long history; a statement that is supported by this very article’s existence. Among the most popular questions we ask each other are ‘Who is your favourite Doctor?’, ‘What is your favourite Doctor Who story?’, and ‘Who is your favourite villain?’ However, the one that really confuses me is a question that is rarely ever asked directly, but one that remains very prominent within the fan community: ‘Who is your Doctor?’

whodoc copy

In answering this strange query, we must answer another question entirely: Into what criterion must we categorise an incarnation of the good Doctor to consider him ours? By what measure do we place possession on a particular portrayal of this fictional character? Some of you are probably thinking this is just another way of asking the old ‘who is your favourite?’ question. It is, in fact, completely different. Ones favourite Doctor may not be ones own Doctor.

Tricky, eh? You might think, as many do, that the Doctor you grew up watching is, by default, your Doctor. This certainly seems to have been the case for David Tennant, evidenced by his glee at declaring ‘You were my Doctor’ to Peter Davison during ‘Time Crash’. But again, and I’m sorry, but I’m going to be difficult and say I think it goes a bit deeper than that, for me, anyway.

As a fan born at the dawn of the 90s, I was never really going to have time to ‘grow up’ with a particular Doctor, rather grow up with the ghosts of all of them. What’s more, I don’t think your Doctor is necessarily the first one you were exposed to. The first story I ever saw was ‘Spearhead from Space’, starring Jon Pertwee. It scared me witless (living plastic shop window dummies!?), and made a lasting impression on me, but at that point, I wasn’t what you’d call a Doctor Who fan. Jon wasn’t the Doctor; he was just ‘Dr. Who’.

And that’s the thing. The way I see it, your Doctor is not necessarily a Doctor you like, or indeed understand. But he’s the Doctor that cemented your fandom, the actor that made you realise how wonderful this show really is. I spent hours watching tapes of Bill, Jon and Tom run up and down corridors and be savaged by strange creatures, which was fun, no doubt. Nevertheless, it wasn’t until I saw Peter Davison’s bright, young face emerge from Sid Sutton’s famous star field title sequence that I knew this programme was something really special.

After that, I began seeking out and collecting his episodes, one by one, mostly from market stalls. The fifth Doctor had priority. ‘Earthshock’, ‘Kinda’, ‘Warriors of the Deep’, ‘Resurrection of the Daleks’, they were all being slowly ticked off, as I absorbed more and more of this Doctor’s nature. I seemed to empathise with him, to unquestionably accept that he was the Doctor, my Doctor. To me, he was the most memorable, the most convincing of all the Doctors. He personified the role, and I think, in my case, always will. Please, feel free to disagree with my strange and confusing theory, but before you do, just take a moment to reflect. Assess who your Doctor really is.

So, what do you think, am I insane? Yes, OK, I thought so.

LP

  • Kody Hencz

    I wouldn’t say you’re insane, at all. I was always bothered by Who fans stating that the first Doctor you saw was, ‘your doctor’.

    The first one that I saw and who introduced me to the series I now love was Christopher Eccleston, who I think is a very accomplished actor and was an amazing Doctor.. wish he had stayed on for longer.

    But I wouldn’t call him my doctor. Only after getting into the series, learning about it and watching other Doctors did I find mine, Tom Baker. He caught me up in Who, the character, the universe, the ideals of the man he portrayed for so long and taught me more than one lesson about how to think about life, as corny as that may sound.

    So hats off to you, LP, for the intelligent article!

    -Kody

  • Peter

    While it may not entirely be true that “your Doctor” is the one you grew up with, it can certainly be a great influence on cementing your idea of who and what this character is all about. It certainly is with me.

    My PBS (Public Television in America) station re-broadcast each season of Doctor Who about a year after it came out in England, meaning I was watching Sylvester McCoy back before I can even remember. I had quite a bit of access to video tapes (official and unofficial) and books (Target novelizations, anthologies, the humongous behind-the-scenes books, etc), and I too ended up loving and rather eclectically watching the “ghosts” of a program that was no longer being aired in a different country, let alone my own. While Tom Baker was the most readily available (partly due to the sheer number of stories he was in compared to the others), I always seemed to gravitate toward McCoy’s Doctor. The darker complexities of his character (especially in his last season), that alien air of mystery; comedy hiding a calculating and sometimes callous mind, introduced to me at an early age and reinforced by the ‘New Adventures’ line of novels (which I read at a far younger age than I think they were intended), remains permanently ingrained in my mind as the definitive Doctor.