Abraham_uk wrote...
This episode went on a very risky path and in my mind managed to prevent the Doctor from making that wretched decision. I still view the Doctor as a monster, but an interesting monster. A complex monster. One whose travels I still want to follow.
I find it very hard to take the idea of the Doctor as a monster seriously when the only time we've ever seen him take a life is literally unstoppable psychopathic evil, or having it passed off as someone else's choice. I mean, he's wiped off Daleks and Cybermen like it's no one's business, but they don't count enough for a moral crisis from anyone. Unless you're the 10th doctor, I suppose.
It is also quite liberating. The Doctor doesn't have to be a squeaky clean hero. The Doctor can get it wrong. The Doctor has got it wrong many times during the series. I'm glad that his fallibility is being explored as opposed to being glossed over.
Getting it wrong is very different from wiping his hands clean. Doctor Who is always about these insane on the fly ideas that keep the doctor from getting his hands dirty - and that's fine. But the Moment goes way, way, beyond that. It was not only an integral aspect of the character for 7 years, but it was literally built into almost every single plotline for the past 7 years.
The entire New Who conception of the Doctor just falls apart without it. And the idea that the other stuff he did in the Time War still counts clearly doesn't work by the series own logic, because 10th and 11th are quite cool with giving a thumbs up to the War Doctor for deciding against the moment despite ostensibly all this other terrible stuff.
The Doctor is a time meddler which in and of itself is morally questionable.
Think about it this way. If I went back in time and altered a few events here and there, you'd never have been born. Heck I think I would have caused temporal suicide (some how preventing me from being born too).
The causal chain here is a bit silly. I wouldn't be born - but someone else would. Maybe billions of others who wouldn't otherwise have been.Literally every decision we make can - at some degree of separation - be traced to someone living or dying, but that's not what makes us morally culpable for their living or dying.
Besides, the show isn't about some abstract time travel morality that absolutely never gets addressed or touched on in any single way in the show. It used to be about the person of person the doctor is, but apparently that person is someone who can be considered an insane war criminal for 40 years but then sudddenly turn into a saviour for not nuking his own home world.
Retour en haut
