Gaining Momentum: The Power of Backstory in the New Doctor Who

Right now, Doctor Who is an unstoppable force. After 16 years on hiatus and a mediocre TV movie, the grand old staple of BBC science fiction returned in 2005 to capture a new generation of fans. Having completed its second new season (or “series” to the Brits), the show is currently preparing to launch a third season as well as a spinoff, Torchwood. Under the guiding hand of executive producer Russell T. Davies, the new Who has grown up from its “children’s show” roots to become darker, more complex, more tightly arced, more psychologically realistic, and altogether very 21st century.

Davies’s creative team has resurrected the show with subtlety and panache, matching pathos with wit and fun. Yet the popularity of Doctor Who today owes as much to its venerable history as to its stylish revival. From episode one back in 1963, Doctor Who was fun, original, and -- perhaps most important -- endlessly adaptable. The Doctor, a Time Lord, and his companions jaunt around time and space in his TARDIS (which stands for Time and Relative Dimensions in Space), having adventures and foiling evil. Each adventure throws the viewer into some unexpected place: 18th century Scotland, 20th century Paris, the planet Gallifrey, the far-future end of the Earth. The companions are usually contemporary young human women, characters for the young target audience to relate to.1 The Doctor serves as voice of wisdom and a figure of viewer identification in his own right. From day one, this "children's show" promised infinite variety with a "cool" cast of characters enacting good values.

Doctor Who was always a show of incredible breadth. What it lacked was depth. Despite forays into deeper emotional territory -- the first Doctor (William Hartnell) parting ways with his granddaughter, Susan (Carole Ann Ford), the fifth Doctor (Peter Davison) witnessing the death of his companion, Adric (Matthew Waterhouse) -- the show generally opted for the fun adventure over meticulous character and universe development. Yet even if a show is not designed to develop backstory, over a quarter century, backstory develops. This is nowhere more evident than in the Doctor himself, who -- to date -- has regenerated nine times, to be played by ten actors, each adapting the character while maintaining his core traits: respect for all sorts of life forms, vast knowledge, adventurousness, etc. The Doctor is a character who walked backwards into backstory, acquiring a vast personal history simply by featuring in a vast number of adventures.

His long history generates narrative impact in the new series episode, “Dalek” (1.6). Created in 1963 by renowned BBC science fiction writer, Terry Nation, the pepper-pot-shaped Daleks are among the most recognizable icons of Doctor Who. They are also clearly the stuff of 1960s TV science fiction: scary, implacable alien hoards bent on “extermination.” Asked to account for the popularity of the Daleks, Nation once explained, "I think it's this -- that kids love to be frightened. To them it's like creeping up to the top of the stairs in the dark, which is surely a healthy emotion" (qtd. in Haining 30). More recent narratives, in contrast, have favored a more “multicultural” assumption: aliens should be negotiated with.2 Fleeing and fighting them are interim steps on the path to mutual understanding. It is from this perspective that new Who companion, Rose (Billie Piper), views her first Dalek, a prisoner being unconscionably tortured by unfeeling humans. The ninth Doctor (Christopher Eccleston), however, knows from long experience that there is no befriending a Dalek. It will kill as many humans as it can, he explains, “because it honestly believes they should die. Human beings are different, and anything different is wrong.” If this story had originated in 2005, the contrast between the Doctor's and Rose's perspectives could easily seem contrived, the Doctor’s view too simplistic to fairly describe an entire civilization. But the Doctor’s analysis is borne out by evidence from throughout the series. The weight of the Dalek backstory lends credibility to the ethical conflict that forms the backbone of the episode: is it possible to come to terms with a Dalek?

The deployment of backstory, similarly, contributes to the psychological development of the Doctor's character. Take, for example, Susan. The first episode of the original show introduced us to the Doctor and his granddaughter. So little concerned is Doctor Who with filling in the details that forty-three years later, we still don’t know which of her parents was the Doctor’s child, if “Susan” was her real name, how the Doctor came to have custody of her, or how long she lived with him. We do know that she and the Doctor loved each other: that’s clear on-screen. We know that the Doctor had to let her go (in the 1964 adventure, "The Dalek Invasion of Earth") and that, for the next several centuries, he went on without her. Explicit references to Susan’s loss may be limited to the episodes surrounding her departure, but the very press of four decades (our time) of her absence compounds that loss into a profound statement of the Doctor’s aloneness, of his separation from his own people, his own family. In the original series, this type of backstory was seldom overtly invoked. Yes, it seems more than coincidental that the Doctor has a preference for young, female companions, perhaps, as Brian Dipaolo argues, replacements to "fill the emotional gap left by [Susan's] departure." And yes, we can make interpretive moves like reading the father/daughter dynamic of the seventh Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) and Ace (Sophie Aldred) against the father/daughter dynamic of the first Doctor and Susan. But seldom do we see direct textual references to previous emotional or interpersonal events.

The new series, however, inherited too massive a trove of backstory to pass it by. With the first new season, the (ninth) Doctor's life story must be read in the context of the Time War, in which the Doctor destroyed his own people in order to destroy those ever-so-persistent Daleks. But since destroying a time traveling species like the Daleks at one point in time does not effectively eliminate it, this destruction encompassed, more or less, an erasure of the Time Lords and Daleks from history. With some (rather confusing) exceptions, it is as if they never existed.3 In the new series, the Doctor mentions several times that he is the last of his kind. In “Dalek” (1.6), he states that he would have sensed other surviving Time Lords. In “Father’s Day” (1.8), he reminds Rose that his whole family is dead. One implication is that Susan, as a member of the Doctor’s species, has been not only killed but, in some sense, wiped out of history -- by her own grandfather. Without explicitly declaring this idea, narrative events plunge us into pathos far more “real” than the standard science-fiction assertion of sole survivorhood. We can feel the Doctor’s loss precisely because we can go back to older episodes and see what he has lost. Yet so subtle is the reference that viewers who do not know that history are not made to feel that they are missing out on anything.

Doctor Who has always served multiple audiences. Writing of the original show, Peter B. Gregg observes, “[I]ts plot and dramatic tension needed to be mature enough for the parents, but appealing to the children” (651). Today, its long history puts Doctor Who in the happy position of being able to narrate simultaneously on two levels: one aimed at the casual viewer, the other at the devoted fan. Consider again the “Susan” theme in the light of the new series episode, “The Empty Child” (1.9), where the Doctor converses with a World War II-era physician, Dr. Constantine:

DR. CONSTANTINE. Before this war began, I was a father and a grandfather. Now I am neither. But I am still a doctor.
DOCTOR. Yeah. Know the feeling.

It’s a throwaway line that makes perfect sense to the viewer who knows nothing of Doctor Who besides the new series. The new episodes tell us that the Doctor has lost his people, and obviously he’s still a “doctor.” Yet to the viewer concerned with backstory, this interchange pierces all the way back to very first episode, 27 seasons earlier, reminding us in concrete terms of exactly what -- and who -- the Doctor has lost. A second effect of this minimalist insertion of backstory is an effective conjunction of pathos and restraint. The narrative gains power by skirting melodramatic emotional pronouncements in favor of the “less is more” approach of letting events speak for themselves. We sympathize with the Doctor more because he is not (usually) overtly self-pitying: his pains must be read between the lines.

Much of the force of Doctor Who is based on what is not said. While most of the new series episodes ably stand on their own, they can also be read against 28 seasons’ worth of background information. The weight of years through which we can follow the Doctor’s life lends credibility to his character’s professions of age and experience and depth to his griefs. No other science fiction TV show can achieve this effect simply because no other science fiction show has so many years of continuity of character to draw on. Thus, whatever vicissitudes in writing quality the show has encountered over the years, the phenomenon of Doctor Who steams forward, propelled by its own sheer mass into an ever richer documentation of one of the most fascinating characters in TV science fiction history.

¹ Carole Ann Ford has remarked that her character, Susan, "was originally going to be quite a tough little girl -- a bit like The Avengers lady [. . . .] Then they decided they wanted me to be a normal teenage girl so that other teenage girls could identify with me" (qtd. in Haining 81). While teenage girls would have to wait a few decades for Buffy, Doctor Who's persistent emphasis on female characters as figures of identification for a female demographic was unusual in 1960s TV science fiction (and is, indeed, still unusual today).

² In “How to Ruin Doctor Who,” written shortly before the launch of the new series, Joe Newbery cautions against letting the Doctor reflect this “relativist” ethic, remarking with some sarcasm:

If the Doctor can be seen advocating a contemporary relativist stance, particularly toward alien races whose behavior is objectionable, precisely where an otherwise principled and formal equality between races might be used to judge such behavior on the level ground of abstract equals, then the Doctor will have been properly updated to a non-British internationalist point of view.

The episode, "Dalek," makes an effective compromise between these "old school" and "updated" ideologies by portraying this "contemporary relativist stance," at least to the extent of encouraging sympathy for the Dalek, in juxtaposition to the Doctor's conviction that the Dalek must be exterminated.

³ For a far more complete and coherent explanation of Time Wars, see Wikipedia's Time War entry.

Dipaolo, Brian. "First Among Doctors." Outpost Gallifrey: Articles and Features. 11 August 2006. .

Gregg, Peter B. "England Looks to the Future: The Cultural Forum Model and Doctor Who." The Journal of Popular Culture. 37.4 (2004): 648-61.

Haining, Peter. Doctor Who: A Celebration: Two Decades through Time and Space. London: W. H. Allen, 1983.

Newbery, Joe. "How to Ruin Doctor Who." Outpost Gallifrey: Articles and Features. 11 August 2006. http://www.gallifreyone.com/article.php?id=ruin

"Time War (Doctor Who)." Wikipedia. 11 August 2006. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_War_(Doctor_Who)