Do good Time Lords need rules?

[I’m going to go ahead and assume that, if you’re reading this, you’ve seen “When a Good Man Goes to War.” Meaning 1) I’m not going to bother with a summary, and 2) consider yourself spoiler-warned.]

Well, that sure was something. The last episode of Doctor Who before the mid-season break feels almost like a finale, answering as it does the biggest mystery of the last three years—who the heck River Song is.* It was great to see a greatest-hits type roundup of some of the neater minor characters, aliens, and neato costumes of the last few seasons, too. But most interesting to me was this exchange between the Doctor and mysterious-eyepatch-villain-lady Madame Kovarian:

Mme KOVARIAN: “Good men have too many rules.”

THE DOCTOR: “Good men don’t need rules… Today is not the day to find out why I have so many.”

Moral implications within moral implications there: first, the concept of an innate moral imperative; the idea of an obtainable absolute good—and then, the revelation that the Doctor does not necessarily have that moral imperative, and that he has not obtained that absolute good. 

Step back, then, and take a look at the army the Doctor has assembled to face down the military-church hybrid on Demons Run. (Yep, it’s the same cleric-military from “The Time of Angels”—more on that later.) The Doctor has assembled some old friends, from the space pirates of “Curse of the Black Spot” to the Spitfire pilots of “Victory of the Daleks" to Dorium, the blue-skinned fence. There were a couple characters we haven’t seen before, too: Madame Vastra, a sword-wielding Silurian from Victorian England, and Strax, a Sontaran warrior serving as a nurse as penance for an unknown offence.

The Doctor has worked with warriors before—heck, he spent years as a member of UNIT, which was basically the alien-fighting branch of the British Armed Forces. But his willingness to team up with Vastra—who we first see moments after she’s eaten someone (sure, it was Jack the Ripper, but still) and who kills one of the Church’s soldiers on Demons Run—poses an interesting moral conundrum. The Doctor has always shown an unwillingness to kill, or to participate in killing, no matter the purpose. For him, the ends have never justified the means. In “Genesis of the Daleks,” he had the opportunity to destroy the first batch of Dalek mutants, thereby stopping the Daleks from ever being created and saving every life they would otherwise have taken—but he couldn’t bring himself to kill. The 9^th and 10^th Doctor were fairly dark, as incarnations go, but that darkness was internal—it meant lots of brooding, not lots of violence. The 11^th Doctor, for all his surface happy-go-luckiness, is a much more dangerous Doctor by far. In the opening story of this season, he essentially instructs the entire human race to murder the Silence—not to imprison them, or drive them away, but to kill them. And he does so by implanting a message in the film footage of the moon landing—writing violence into an image of peace and human achievement. And when the title card announcing the next episode states “Let’s Kill Hitler”—well, one beigins to think that perhaps this Doctor might not have hesitated to kill that first batch of Daleks.

And it is in this context that we learn that the Doctor does not consider himself a “good man”—that he has had to make rules for himself to keep him from crossing certain moral lines. Furthermore, we learn that the Doctor’s actions have begun to affect galactic culture: the word “Doctor,” in some languages, no longer means “healer,” but rather “fierce warrior.”** He is affecting the very language with which reality is described and stories are told. (This, I think, is the reason for the future military using ecclesiastical titles: the meaning of words, in this part of the future, can no longer be trusted.) And when is the last time we saw a great assembly of alien warriors including the Judoon and the Sontarans? …When all of the “bad guy” aliens teamed up to imprison the Doctor in the Pandorica. And that episode, too, played with the Doctor's moral position, depicting him as a mythological monster, "a nameless, terrible thing soaked in the blood of a billion galaxies, the most feared being in all the cosmos." I may be reading too much into things—I do tend to pay extraordinarily close attention to the Doctor’s ethical decisions—but I think the Steven Moffat wants us to see the Doctor sliding away from his past morality and into murkier territory. Hmmm… Is the Valeyard on the horizon?

*I don’t think it’s bragging to say I had pretty much guessed it—but more specifically, I knew there had to be something going on with water names!

**Makes you wonder about Dr. River Song's honorific...

Comments

[Erin]

Good point on Dr. Song. I'm loving the inference that Doctor is his name. That could extend to all renegade Time Lords: they're not trading their names for descriptors to travel through time - by traveling through time and interfering with cultures across the cosmos, their names become descriptors.

[Marilynn Byerly]

The only thing the Doctor can do to stop the Silence who not only make you forget them but can also implant a hypnotic suggestion for future behavior in their victims is to kill them on sight which negates the Silence's two strengths.

The recorded alien in the moon landing tape says exactly that. Humanity's only chance is to kill on sight.

[Gabriel Mckee]

I'm not so convinced that that was the only solution to the problem of the Silence. The Doctor has always excelled at finding impossible solutions, and at defeating his enemies without killing them. Does this mean I didn't think it was an ingenious solution? No. Does this mean I didn't like the episode? Of course not. But I certainly don't think we're expected to conclude that it was the right thing to do just because the Doctor did it. We now know he has had to make rules to keep himself in line. I think we've started to see him breaking those rules... and I'm very interested to see where that leads.

[Jenn V.]

I finally watched this episode for the third time last night and am ready to start processing. As soon as River Song's identity was confirmed (as soon as the word "Melody" was uttered, I was finally for real sure), I started having flashbacks to every River episode ever, and it made me too sad to even think for a while. I'm still wrapping my head around that one. I can't decide whether to go back and watch every River episode ever, or to never watch "Silence in the Library" again.

Ahem. On the other hand, I'm having a discussion with a friend (who is having an existential crisis, or perhaps catharsis, or perhaps epiphany) about what it takes to be a good man and/or a just man. I'm using the Doctor as a jumping off point, because while the Doctor doesn't think of himself as a good man (or even a man, probably) I think that he is. 11 has shown us that being a (hu)man is something that one can choose to be, no matter how plastic or Dalek-made one starts. On the other hand, 11 seems to much quicker to eliminate a threat, and I think it's interesting to show how that is rebounding on him so violently. 11 seems to still have that small, soft place for things that are the last of their kind...but doesn't fear wiping out legions & species all at a whack.

I have reams more to say on the topic of 11 & Justice, but I've wandered all over this comment, and I'll just leave it at that. I was very surprised at the title of "Let's Kill Hitler," for another half dozen reasons, so I'm sure I'll have more to say about Doctor Who in the future.

[Chris Todd]

The Doctor did not commit genocide. Rather he used the video to make sure that the Silence could not continue to go about their business, confident that anyone seeing them would just react with surprise and promptly forget. This was his way of forcing them to run (or be killed.) The video saying we should shoot them on sight, by the way, was the opinion of a member of the Silence. Evidently, they have no problem seeing themselves as a deadly threat to humanity.

[marc m]

First off, great blog and blog post...the read was suggested to me by one of your regular readers :)

With the benefit of hindsight now, a few thoughts...

1) See this (hopefully the link translates):

https://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.drwho/browse_thread/thread/7cd734f99a62ae98/c845f05e9b213df9?pli=1

Moffet had that line - about the word Doctor for healer....15 years before he wrote that episode. I am in AWE.

2) The Doctor has killed someone.

Of course, this amplifies to the "when people ask you if it is a good idea to try and get to me through the people I love" explosion. What exactly happens when he doesn't follow his rules? Divine punishment? He changes? He knows that he will change? Have we yet seen the result of getting angry and the Doctor saying, "I'm angry, that's new...I don't know what will happen now..."

He killed the Amy ganger in The Almost People. Strangely, while he says after being angry he doesn't know what will happen, and he utters that same phrase someplace earlier (I can't remember when, now)...there is never mention of the fact that he kills the ganger, only the "Given what we now know I'll try and do this as humanely as possible."

3) Also, the having rules thing...later on doesn't seem as much a "moral imperative" as a set of guidelines that he uses to teach River. He needs to write a book "How to Be a Time Lord". Seriously, though. While this might not make them any less of a moral imperative (I suppose all teachings are a moral imperative at heart), not all of the rules he speaks in Let's Kill Hitler are moral issues (a la "never knowingly be serious. Rule 27. You might want to write these down.".

So, was Let's Kill Hitler the day that we find out why there are so many rules? I think so. But, maybe there's more to come.

Thanks for provoking more thought. To me, this episode is quite the pinnacle.