Doctor Who: Is The Fifteenth Doctor's Ongoing Tragedy Too Much?

Posted in: BBC, Disney+, TV | Tagged: doctor who, Ncuti Gatwa, russell t davies, steven moffat

Doctor Who: Is The Fifteenth Doctor's Ongoing Tragedy Too Much?

Ncuti Gatwa is the most emotionally open take on the Doctor in the new Doctor Who era, but is the constant tragedy getting to be too much?

Published Sat, 28 Dec 2024 07:38:08 -0600
by Adi Tantimedh
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Doctor Who is different again. That's the nature of the show, to change with the times, and the Doctor keeps changing. There have been more than fifteen actors in the role by now, but the biggest change has been a more overtly emotional Doctor than ever. Showrunner Russell T. Davies said he had spent the last few years observing young people in crisis, especially during the pandemic lockdown, so he wanted the new Doctor Who to provide an outlet for kids and teenagers. He wanted a new Doctor to be more openly emotional, more sincere, less stoical, and repressed in that old British way. Indeed, the style of British writers from the 1960s to the 1980s has been to outright avoid men expressing their emotions as much as possible unless in an extreme situation like a loss. In films and television, men only really cry when someone they love dies. The Fifteenth Doctor wears his heart on his sleeve, loves hugs, and offers emotional support to his friends, including his previous self (David Tennant). And Ncuti Gatwa has one of the most emotionally open faces on screen, so why not use him for his full range?

The Fifteenth Doctor Fails to Save People. A Lot. 

The Doctor failing to save someone has been a feature, not a bug, of the hero since the 1960s. That's part of the character's tragedy, to always try but never succeed in saving everyone. Writers have always used that trope to give the series pathos. Throughout his first season, the Fifteenth Doctor has frequently failed to save people, all the way to this year's Christmas Special "Joy to the World." He saved Ruby in his first episode and Christmas Special "The Church on Ruby Road" in the way we've all come to expect the Doctor to do, with swashbuckling derring-do and clever thinking. For the rest of the season, he didn't really save anyone. It was often someone else who did it. In "Space Babies," it was Ruby who saved the Snot Baby and him. The Beatles saved him and Ruby in "The Devil's Chord." In "Boom", it was the AI recreation of a father who saved the day. "In 73 Yards," he disappeared, and it was Ruby who got cursed and had to live to the end of a long life before she could go back at the moment of her death to stop him from stepping on a fairy circle that took him. In "Dot and Bubble," Lindy and her racist friends refused his help and proudly trotted off to certain death because they were privileged idiots who thought they knew everything. It was Rogue who saved Ruby from the cosplaying aliens. In "Empire of Death," he saves the universe by finally coming up with a clever plan, but that's by reluctantly killing Sutekh, the God of Death.

The Doctor of Loss

Is failing to save people a feature in the Fifteenth Doctor and not a bug? Is the ongoing theme of the character to witness loss all the time? Both Davies and Steven Moffat have talked about this at length, that the Doctor, as an immortal time traveler, knows when everybody dies, including his friends. Is his failure to save people when they're in danger a new ongoing feature of the character? That could be tricky since one demand in satisfying heroic fiction, which Doctor Who most certainly is, is that the hero has to proactively succeed in saving the day. As an episodic series, the hero can get away with losing sometimes, but surely not all the time in a whole season? The notion that Fifteen is the Doctor of Loss is a potent one, but how long can that go on before the constant deaths and tears become numbing? The Fifteenth might be the most tragic Doctor, but can an audience put up with that on a weekly basis?

Doctor Who is streaming on Disney+ outside the UK.

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