News > TW FEATURE: Doctor Who as Allegory -- The Time War
November 5, 2007
Written by Anthony "This is the exact sort of thing I hope girls I have crushes on never find and read" Burch
Last week I examined the long-running BBC program Doctor Who as an allegory -- specifically, in terms of the Doctor’s ability to regenerate. In this week’s second-to-last article on Who allegory, I’ll be doing pretty much the same thing with the Time War.
Basically, the Time War was an invention by current Who head writer Russell T. Davies. The Time War between the Time Lords and the Daleks more or less took place between the lives of the Eighth and Ninth Doctors. By the time we first see the Ninth Doctor in the first episode of the new series of Doctor Who, he’s freshly regenerated, but speaks of the Time War as if it happened very recently.
From a narrative standpoint, the Time War (which took place totally offscreen, and has never been shown in flashback or even described in great detail by any of the characters) adds a great deal more weight to the new series. The Doctor, having been forced to kill every Time Lord and Dalek in existence to save the universe (or something), is now the last of the Time Lords, thus giving us the chance to see his lonelier side and how his different regenerations deal with having destroyed two entire races in one fell swoop.
Additionally, by telling the audience that every Time Lord and every Dalek in existence is dead, the inevitable reappearance of characters like The Master (the Doctor’s equal, Time Lord archenemy) or the Dalek armies are rendered much more surprising and epic by the implication that they should have all been killed. In terms of storytelling mechanics, the Time War helped to wipe the slate clean for the Doctor and the Daleks, so new viewers with no knowledge of previous Doctor Who adventures could still immediately jump in and enjoy themselves.
So, now that we know what the Time War is really for, let’s explore its completely unintentional allegorical value, shall we?
In the same way that the Doctor’s ability to regenerate parallels our real-life tendency to change into drastically different people over time, the Time War (and its consequences) are indicative of the inevitable pains of growing up and losing friends and loved ones. The Doctor loses everyone he cares about due to massive death and destruction; we regular folk lose them to changes in location, accidents, or drastic shifts in their personalities.
This may well be the point you stop reading this article altogether and write its author off as a complete loon. I say this because the following thirteen words may well comprise the dumbest, nerdiest sentence you’ve ever read in your entire life:
For the purposes of this allegory, Daleks will represent the passage of time.
While the “time” in the Doctor’s Time War refers to a fight across time, for time, possibly using time as a weapon, humanity’s Time War is a constant fight against time -- against aging, against change, against the inevitable drifting away and death of friends, family, and loved ones.
The Doctor loses everyone and everything he cares about in the Time War, but he still soldiers on in life; he continues to travel around in his TARDIS, explore new places, and meet new people. Not necessarily because he’s a permanently chipper, can-do kind of guy, mind you, but because it’s in his nature and -- quite frankly -- there’s not much else he can do. Other than suicide, the Doctor has no real choice but to move on from the biggest tragedy of his lifetime(s) and keep on keeping on, so to speak. Even after indirectly losing his new girlfriend to the last remnants of the Dalek army, the Doctor steps right back into his ship (after an appropriate period of mourning, obviously).
It’s the same with us human beings when we undergo any massive trauma. Losing a girlfriend or boyfriend may cause us to spend a few months shut off from the world bitching about it, but we’ll always step back into the saddle sooner or later. If an older relative dies, we’ll mourn their loss, but continue on with our lives because, hey -- what the hell else are we going to do? We carry the trauma and sorrow with us permanently, but we don’t let it destroy who we are.
Granted, the post-Time War Doctors have had two markedly different ways of dealing with their sorrow: the Ninth confronted it head-on and cried about it a few times, whereas the Tenth all but denies its existence unless he absolutely has to. Yet, one of the only times he speaks of the Time War, and the loss of his home planet (Gallifrey), is so damned poignant that I just had to embed it here. In the first scene, the Doctor is lying to Martha (and himself); in the second, he tells the truth.
These scenes are even more interesting when one considers that, historically speaking, the Doctor really didn’t have that much fondness for his home planet, or its denizens. The Time Lords were a race of complete noninterventionism, a philosophy the Doctor despised; the Time Lords once gave the Doctor the opportunity to lead them, but he ducked out; hell, one time the Time Lords friggin’ killed the Doctor simply in the hopes that his next regeneration would be easier to control. In his past, the Doctor didn’t necessarily hold a great deal of affection for his home. Now that it’s gone, he can’t help but lie to himself about its existence and romanticize every element of its geography. As positively stomach-churning as it is to invoke any cliché remotely similar to “you don’t know what you have until it’s gone,” it does apply here.
People react in damn near the same way when they lose something with which they had ambivalent feelings toward. We tend to remember the good more frequently than the bad in human relationships which once meant a great deal to us, but have since degraded over time due to any number of outside influences. We romanticize our friendships, our love affairs; we lie to ourselves that they were happier and more fulfilling than they were, always wishing we could go back, wishing people wouldn’t change, wishing circumstances had been different. In the end, though, our fantasizing amounts to nothing and we -- like the Doctor -- have to move on, alone, and find a new way of making it in the world (potentially creating a new version of ourselves in the process).
The Time War is something we cannot win; “we lost,” the Doctor says. “Everyone lost.” Life, and time, can leave us scarred. But the Doctor, and, by extension, we as a race, do the only thing we can do, the only thing that’s right; we move forward, for better or for worse.
You may notice that I didn’t include anything about the reappearance of the Master in my allegory. Sorry; even I can’t stretch that far just to prove a point.
Now click HERE to see the third (and final) part of the Doctor Who as Allegory trilogy: the Sonic Screwdriver!
