Moral Terror: Doctor Who and Violence

Guest contributor James Blanchard explores the role of violence within the show.

“Horror has a face. And you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends; if they are not, then they are enemies to be feared.” — Walter E. Kurtz

Doctor Who came second in WatchMojo’s Top 10 Science Fiction Series, just behind The Next Generation, which I can tolerate as one might tolerate a crying toddler on a bus. One of their reasons for ranking it so high, it seemed, was that the Doctor always saves the day through ‘non-violent means’. This made me raise an eyebrow; ‘always’ would be a strong word to use, even if I wasn’t racking my brains to think of a time that violence wasn’t a key part of the Doctor’s many victories.

Doctor Who has incredibly complex relationship with violence. It’s true enough that the Doctor abhors the use of guns, refuses to execute prisoners, and moralises on how killing only begets more killing. But there are many different types of violence; physical violence is the most obvious, but there’s psychological and emotional violence too, as well a kind of moral violence.

I’ve opened with a quote from Apocalypse Now, partially because it highlights how much violence seeps into the world-view of someone who surrounds themselves with it, but also because it’s a film that discusses violence in a very unique way. It’s based upon Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and both are about the journey down a river of some frightening foreign land, and the representation of madness along the way. There’s a literary theory about Apocalypse Now that I’m rather fond of — that is, that the ‘Heart of Darkness’ is a literal, actual entity, that spreads a violent doctrine; the face of horror if you will. The journey of Captain Willard, descending through the varying levels of madness in his attempt to find Colonel Kurtz, is the Heart ‘calling’ to him, drawing him to it, so that when he and Kurtz meet, and Willard performs the ultimate act of violence, the Heart of Darkness moves from the possession of Kurtz, and into Willard’s. The Heart of Darkness exists in a lot of literature, from the very literal Master/Apprentice dynamic in Return of the Jedi, or the figurative nugget in A Storm of Swords when Arya meets the Ghost of High Heart.

That established, we’ll come back to it later, and get back to actually talking about Doctor Who for a minute. Something worth thinking about is why the show bothers to portray violence in such a negative, undesirable light, when the heroes of modern culture are generally revered for their ability to solve problems through the strategy of hitting things. Perhaps it’s the nature of the Doctor’s heroism; he’s clever, solves problems through intellect rather than force, and, as Slavoj Zizek put it, ‘violence is the arm of indolence’. It becomes a little hard to believe that the Doctor’s actions as a man-of-science are totally genuine if he relies on the diplomatic prowess of Mr Fist all the time.

Of course the Doctor is violent, though, especially towards races he doesn’t like. Someone, somewhere, must keep a tally of the the number of Daleks he’s killed, and no doubt it’s so large George Osborne will insist on cutting it. Probably because he feels some kind of kinship with them. Satire aside, I think the Doctor’s personal relationship with violence is a reflection of his character, more than something more broadly thematic. After all, in the show’s very first story the Doctor goes to bash in a caveman’s skull. Was he wrong to do that? I don’t know, it’s quite a morally grey issue, but it’s something the Doctor evolves on. When it comes to physical violence, the Doctor is very much against doing anything first-hand. He’s quite happy to let races destroy themselves, to flick buttons that causes their demise, or even to take up some intellectual gymnastics to claim that his enemies are ‘doing it to themselves’, like in the case of the Racnoss in The Runaway Bride. When it comes to getting his hands dirty, well, he’s less fond — take his long, forlorn, agonised stare as he prepares to execute Davros in Resurrection of the Daleks, or his loud, moralising, and, frankly, self-aggrandising speech in The Doctor’s Daughter. The Doctor is many things, including a hypocrite.

I think the kind of violence it’s easiest to associate the Doctor is one I mentioned before — moral violence. Allow me to explain what I mean by that: when Boots’ boss Stefano Pessina called the hypothetical election of Ed Miliband’s Labour Party a ‘potential catastrophe’, he was being morally violent; he was calling the actions of Labour morally wrong, and that they would reap consequences, even though, in truth, as a big business leader any economic disaster would be of his doing (pray forgive me for bringing politics into this, but it seemed like a good example). This is what the Doctor does — he moralised, gives an acceptable situation or circumstance, and when his enemies break them, he brings retribution, but because he gave them the moral terms of engagement, he can claim that their fate is their own doing. I’m not a fan of The End of Time, but the line “[I] manipulated people into taking their own [lives]” is a perfect one, in my opinion, as it fully shows how the Doctor’s brand of violence works.

Let’s bring this back to the Heart of Darkness, and whether such a thing exists in the universe of Doctor Who. Assuming it does, who would hold it? There are a lot of contenders, because there are an awful lot of evil people in this universe, and an inordinate amount of races who are totally dedicated to nothing but violence. I think, if anyone, were to hold it though it would be the Master, based on the precedent set in Apocalypse Now; in order to gain possession of the Heart of Darkness, Willard has to perform the ultimate act of violence against it’s current vessel, Kurtz — AKA, he must execute him. And, as mentioned before, the one the thing the Doctor doesn’t do is execute. The reason I lean towards the Master as the possessor is that the Doctor is given a huge number of opportunities to do just this. In New Who alone, the Master is cuffed and at gun point in Last of the Time Lords, but the Doctor forbids this directly violent form of justice, and in Death in Heaven the Doctor comes inches from killing Missy (to ‘save [Clara’s] soul’, or, perhaps, to save her from the Heart), and this is straight off the back of her handing him an adoring army to do it with, not dissimilar to Colonel Kurtz’s cult.

So why does the Doctor not give in? I want to bring up Slavoj Zizek again, and his ideas of ‘subjective violence’ — this is a kind of personal violence, associated with the idea of our own self. People are violent towards us in many intricate ways; we’re given names, rather than choosing our own; we’re told as children that our opinions are less worth while for lack of experience; a democracy that hurts people must be accepted, because it is the best form of government, regardless of your personal standing within it. But we can also be violent towards ourselves, and this is why I think the Doctor is seemingly immune to possession of the Heart — he made a violent act against himself, blew away his personality and adopted one he created for himself, that of ‘the Doctor’. Doctor Who as a show has always believed that self-determining your own identity makes for a much stronger spirit than carrying one assigned to you. A Doctor is not meant to make a friend of horror, rather they fight it, and see it’s end. In contrast, ‘the Master’ is much more a persona created by the Heart, one of domination, horror, and the other virtues extolled by Colonel Walter E Kurtz.

I don’t want to give a definitive answer to question of Doctor Who and its relationship with violence, rather I was aiming to band around a few ideas, and promote some healthy debate (though preferably not a violent one). The Doctor is ultimately a violent agent, sure, but in the story of Doctor Who, in the context of the enemies he faces, and alongside the hope that he brings, I think he, in the end, has to remain our good guy.