12 Days of Christmas – Day 12
We’re at the end! How boxing clever of us, and we’ve days to go now to the last half of Tennant’s and Rusty’s home run, the end of The End of Time.
Last question then, and for inspiration let us look to the original Doctor, the Governor, Mr William Hartnell, who created the character from so very little and gave his successors such a fantastic canvas on which to work.
Question 12: After 46 years and especially the last five years the Doctor has changed greatly, becoming younger, more active, and more vulnerable. He increasingly wears his heart on his sleeve, and has a long personal history. In a way, it could be said that the fans of the last two Doctors could claim to know him in a more intimate way than any other incarnation. So with that in mind… Has the Doctor lost his mystery, and if so, can he ever get it back in the years to come?
Who is Doctor Who now?
December 26th, 2009 at 3:02 pm
No, I don’t believe the Doctor is particularly less mysterious than say, his Third Incarnation, where we knew his world and he was an isolated exile fixed to his attachments to modern day Earth.
The Time War has added a appropriate air of mystery to his interviening years, and really do nu-who fans go out and watch the Deadly Assasin for the grand revelations of Gallifrey and it’s people.
To the general public he is as mysterious (or not) as he always was. To new fans, there is a past if they wish to explore it, but it never provided all the answers anyway, and for us old fan, we saw the attempts in the Carmel Era/Times Champion reboot, and really the series blurring of the past in the Dalek apocalapse is more satisfyingly suitably vauge.
The Doctor is the new Doctor, the man he always was, as far as we ever knew him then.
P.S. The last three banners are undoubtedly the best… and I only got the countdown reference this morning. Nicely done.
December 26th, 2009 at 9:51 pm
Certainly we fans know a lot more about him that we did before, we know his planet of origin, race, some of his background personal history…
There is still a lot of history yet to uncover though. Although I think doing a “Year One” would be a mistake. In many ways we don’t need his history, we know who he is, in that he is a hero, someone for us to look up to, deconstructing that will take away a lot of that status.
(That said, cf the Batman origin movies…)
The current focus is, of course, the Time War, but a lot of that has come to light. Enough so that going back to it will be merely “filling in the gaps” a la Babylon 5 movies, rather than adding anything real.
Best to just move on, and leave him mysterious.