Violence is the Last Refuge of the Incompetent; Further Thoughts on Doctor Who

[danieldwilliam]

I’ve been feeling some disquiet about Doctor Who. It began towards the end of the last series and has been growing ever since. Parts of my disquiet are about the bankruptcy of  narrative if there is no continuity or consequence. Reading some of the critism of recent episodes I think I’ve found another part of the disquiet. It’s about role models.

 When I was growing up the Doctor was a strange role model. He was a hero but outside of the paradigm of the other heroes I was offered. He wasn’t a John Wayne, a Grail Knight, or Dirty Harry or even Luke Skywalker. He solved problems with his brain and often through other people. He was ecentric. He liked ecentrics. He liked people who stood up to authority, including him. He circumvented hierarchy and he wanted you to come with him.

 He didn’t want to be in opposition to the people he encountered. He tried not to use violence. He tried to offer those behaving badly who were in a position of authority a chance to understand the needs of the other side and turn away from a violent confrontation. He looked towards the future and a better state of affairs rather than focus on the immediate conflict.

 He had an ethical code. You could see him wrestling with it when it prevented an easy fix to a problem he had encountered.

 There was lots of action, lots of running up and down corridors. The running up and down corridors was usually a way to buy time to work out the solution to the problem.

 As a boy I think I found it useful to see someone who was odd being respected and respectful. He solved problems with his brain. He treated different people with respect. He took time to understand the problem and the context. The world rarely divided into Good Guys and Bad Guys. There were differing opinions and priorities and usually someone who was behaving badly but there was usually some grey shading in the moral positions of all the characters.

 If I were couching this in Jungian leadership archetypes I would suggest that the Doctor was a Magician rather than the usual fair of Warriors or Sovereigns

 Crucially, he solved problems with his brain and not with weapons. He would agree with Asimov that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.

 He didn’t swagger about with a gun in one hand and a hot chick in the other, smirking or grimancing at the camera and talking in simple and simplistic one-liners.

 Until now.

 When I was a boy I wanted to be like Luke Skywalker but I also wanted to be like the Doctor. I’m not sure I see much difference any more.

I fear that violence is the last refuge of the incompentent Steven Moffat.