#DoctorWho | Werd I/O

Werd I/O

Writing at the intersection of technology, democracy, and society by Ben Werdmuller

The case for Doctor Who as the greatest TV show of all time #savetheday #doctorwho

When a TV show has been there your entire life, not just entertaining you but informing the way you think, it becomes something different.

At its heart, Doctor Who is a show about an eccentric who saves the world, over and over again, using the power of his wit and empathy. It perhaps doesn't sound like much, but that's as radical an idea now as then: a show where the hero refuses to carry a weapon, refuses to conform to any kind of status quo notion about what a person should be, and where anyone who is shown to value physical strength and force above intelligence and cunning is defeated. It's not a show about death or action, although the body count is sometimes very high. It's a show about curiosity and intelligence. Perhaps most importantly, it's a celebration of humanity - which, we're constantly told, must be protected in all its forms.

When the producers adapted to the ailing health of the show's star, William Hartnell, by introducing the concept of regeneration and casting not just a new actor but a whole new character, they baked in the concept of progress and change as being good and replenishing. Evolution and shifting barriers are seen as not just positive things, but necessary for life to go on. More than even Star Trek, Who is knowingly progressive.

It's crucial that the Doctor is someone who thinks and lives outside the box (while, ironically, living inside one). The show flat-out rejects the fascism of everyday life by creating a character obviously un-peer-pressurable, so obviously marching to his own beat.

It's hopefully not too much of a spoiler that the 50th anniversary show - which airs today, in just a few hours - introduces a version of the Doctor who chooses to be a soldier. That this is a shameful part of his history that he must come to terms with is a beautiful example of the subversion inherent to the show. Yes, sometimes it is unfortunately necessary to be a soldier. No, it should never be celebrated. That's so counter to our world right now, and it was in the beginning of the sixties, too, still in the shadow of the second world war, while another battle in Vietnam was being fought in the background. We're all being told to be consumers, to fit into predefined demographics, and yet here is a show telling us that everyone is important, that we should define our own sense of self.

But those are my values, almost exactly. Intelligence over strength; independence over conformity; adventure and curiosity over the status quo. Above all else, think for yourself. It was liberating, as an 8 year old from multiple cultures who lived in another, to have a hero to look up to who was at least as strange as I was, and who valued the same things - and it's liberating now.

Oh, and it's pretty bloody exciting, and obviously made with love. That helps, too.

Werd I/O

"Bring me knitting." #doctorwho

The case for Doctor Who as the greatest TV show of all time #savetheday #doctorwho